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The Jiving Universe

NASA AND THE Development

OF ASTROBIOLOGY

STEVEN J. DICK AND JAMES E. STRICK

Rutgers University Press
New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dick, Steven J.

The living universe : NASA and the development of astrobiology / Steven J. Dick and
James E. Strick.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8135-3447-X (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Exobiology — History. 2. Life on other planets — Research — History. 3. United States.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. L Strick, James Edgar, 1956- II. Title.

QH325.D53 2004
576.8'39— dc22

2004004037

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

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The NASA Vision

To improve life here,
To extend life to there,
To find life beyond

— Announced by NASA Administrator,
Sean O'Keefe, April 12, 2002.

Astrobiology: The study of the living universe. This field provides a
scientific foundation for a multidisciplinary study of (1) the origin
and distribution of life in the universe, (2) an understanding of the
role of gravity in living systems, and (3) the study of the Earth's
atmospheres and ecosystems.

—NASA strategic plan, 1996
(First mention of astrobiology in a published NASA document,
redefined from exobiology)

Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations and Acronyms xi

Introduction 1

Part I 'before the ^pace cAge

1 The Big Picture: Cosmic Evolution and the

Biological Universe 9

Part II J^rom Jputnik to 'L'iking, 1957-1976

2 Organizing Exobiology: NASA Enters

Life Science 23

3 Exobiology, Planetary Protection, and the

Origins of Life 56

4 Vikings to Mars 80

Part III 'broadened Irforizons, 1976-2000

5 The Post-\\k\x\g Revolutions 105

6 The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 131

7 The Search for Planetary Systems 155

viii Contents

8 The Mars Rock 179

9 Renaissance: From Exobiology to Astrobiology 202

Epilogue: Astrobiology Science: Into the Great

Age of Discovery? 221

Appendix A Unpublished Sources 233

Appendix B NASA Leadership in Exobiology 236

Appendix C Topics at the First Astrobiology

Science Conference 239
Appendix D Objectives in the Astrobiology

Roadmap(1999) 240
Notes 243

Selected Bibliography 287
Index 295

Acknowledgments

Research, writing, and oral history interviews for this volume were supported
by NASA grant NAG5-8594 from the exobiology program under Michael Meyer,
by a grant from the NASA History Office under Roger Launius, and by a Visit-
ing Scholar fellowship (for JS) from the Center for the History of Recent Sci-
ence (CHRS), George Washington University, during 2000-2001. The SETI
Institute also played an essential supporting role. Some of this work (for JS)
was supported by a Dibner Postdoctoral Fellowship from 1996 to 1998 and by
the Biology and Society Program at Arizona State University (ASU). Jim Collins
and Jane Maienschein at ASU provided much advice and assistance. Maura
Mackowski was a superb research assistant.

We wish to thank the numerous scientists listed in Appendix A, who gave
freely of their time for oral history interviews. William Hagan freely shared tran-
scripts of his interviews with Richard Young and Cyril Ponnamperuma. Susan
Goldsmith not only ably transcribed interviews but was a fount of thoughtfiil
criticism as well as broad and lively intelligence. We are also grateful to the
individuals and institutions listed in Appendix A who provided access to archives,
especially the late Sidney Fox, Imre Friedmann, the late Harold Klein, Joshua
Lederberg, James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, Harold Morowitz, Adolph Smith,
Carl Woese, and the late Richard Young for allowing access to unpublished pa-
pers. Margulis also allowed access to papers by Elso Barghoom in her posses-
sion. We acknowledge the National Library of Medicine for permission to quote
from the Lederberg papers and the California Institute of Technology Archives
for permission to quote from the Norman Horowitz papers. Dick first presented
parts of chapter 1 at a session on "Evolution and Twentieth-Century Astronomy"
at the History of Science Society Meeting, Denver, Colorado, 8 November 2001.
Portions of chapter 5 are adapted from Steven J. Dick, "The Search for Extra-
terrestrial Intelligence and the NASA High Resolution Microwave Survey
(HRMS): Historical Perspectives," Space Science Reviews 64 (1993): 93-139.

X Acknowledgments

Strick first presented parts of chapter 2 at the History of Science Society meet-
ings in Pittsburgh, 10 November 1999, and in Milwaukee, 8 November 2002,
as well as at the National Air and Space Museum history lecture series, 1 8 Janu-
ary 2001. Portions of chapter 2 are adapted from James Strick, "Creating a
Cosmic Discipline: The Crystallization and Consolidation of Exobiology, 1957-
1973," Journal of the History of Biology 37 (2004). Earlier versions of some
chapters also received substantial and helpful criticism from Nathaniel Com-
fort, Horace Judson, and the weekly seminar at the George Washington
University's Center for the History of Recent Science and from Linda Caren,
John Cronin, Michael Dietrich, Iris Fry, Keith Kvenvolden, Joshua Lederberg,
Lynn Margulis, Stephen Pyne, J. William Schopf, Alan Schwartz, Grier Sellers,
Matt Shindell, Adolph Smith, Mark Solovey, and Audra Wolfe.

Our thanks to the NASA History Office for unfailing support in provid-
ing resources and time, in particular from Stephen Garber, John Hargenrader,
and Roger Launius. Finally, we wish to thank Audra Wolfe, our editor at Rutgers
University Press, who has the unusual quality of knowing the subject thoroughly;
we benefited greatly from her advice and support.

Personal support (for JS), through a long process and several changes of
domicile, were as important as ever in completing a work of this size. JS thanks
his wife, Wendy Sobey, and his children, Rachel and Alexander, for bearing up
under the tensions involved in research and writing. Throughout the process they
good-naturedly maintained a normal life, which helped him keep perspective
and clear priorities. Friend and teacher David Brahinsky also helped JS push
through blocks. SJD wishes to thank his wife, Terry, for her continued support
through more books than she cares to count.

For both authors this has been a unique and rewarding collaboration be-
tween a historian of astronomy and a historian of biology. As with the science
itself, astrobiology history has fostered interdisciplinary cooperation and has led
to insights that would have been unachievable if pursued alone.

Abbreviations and Acronyms

AAMAT Astrobiology Advanced Missions and Technology

ACME Antarctic Cryptoendoiithic Microbial Ecosystems

AEC Atomic Energy Commission

AIBS American Institute of Biological Sciences

ASEE American Society of Engineering Education

ASTEP Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets

ASTID Astrobiology Science and Technology Instrument Development

ATF Astrometric Telescope Facility

AURA Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy

AXAF Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility

BIF banded iron formation

CAN Cooperative Agreement Notice

CASETI Cultural Aspects of SETI

CCD charge-coupled device

CETI communication with extraterrestrial intelligence

CHRS Center for the History of Recent Science

COMPLEX Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration

CORAVEL Correlation Radial Velocities

COSPAR Committee for Space Research

DARPA Defense Advanced Research Project Agency

DoD Department of Defense

EASTEX The East Coast branch of the National Academy of Sciences

Space Sciences Board Panel on Extraterrestrial Life

ECD electron capture detector

ECHO Evolution of Complex and Higher Organisms

ExNPS Exploration of Neighboring Planetary Systems

FAIR Filled-Aperture Infrared

FEG field emission gun

FY fiscal year

xii Abbreviations and Acronyms

GCMS gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer

GEx Viking gas exchange experiment

GHz gigahertz

HRMS High-Resolution Microwave Survey

HST Hubble Space Telescope

ICBM intercontinental ballistic missile

IDP interplanetary dust particle

IOC Initial Orbital Capability

IR infrared

IRAS Infrared Astronomical Satellite

ISSOL International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life

JPL Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, California)

JSC NASA Johnson Space Center (Houston, Texas)

LF Life Finder

LPSC Lunar and Planetary Science Conference

LR Viking labeled release experiment

MAP Multichannel Astrometric Photometer

MCSA Muhi-Channel Spectrum Analyzer

MOP Microwave Observing Project

NAS SSB Space Sciences Board of the National Academy of Sciences

NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NCAR National Center for Atmospheric Research

NGI Next Generation Internet

NGST Next Generation Space Telescope

NIH National Institutes of Health

NRA NASA Research Announcement

NRAO National Radio Astronomy Observatory

NRC National Research Council

NSCORT NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training

NSF National Science Foundation

OAST Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology

OLEB Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere

ONR Office of Naval Research

OOL origins of life

OSI Orbiting Stellar Interferometer

OSSA Office of Space Science and Applications

PAH polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon

PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA)

POINTS Precision Optical Interferometer in Space

PPLO pleuropneumonia-like organisms

PPO planetary protection officer

PPRG Precambrian Paleobiology Research Group

PR (Viking) pyrolytic release experiment

PSSWG Planetary Systems Science Working Group

Abbreviations and Acronyms xiii

SEM scanning electron microscopy

SETI Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

SIM Space Interferometry Mission

SIRTF Space Infrared Telescope Facility

SISWG Space Interferometry Science Working Group

SNC Shergottite-Nakhlite-Chassignite (class of meteorites believed

to be of Martian origin)

SOFIA Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy

SSEC Space Science Exploration Committee

SSED Space Science Exploration Division

SSWG SETI Science Working Group

TEM transmission electron microscopy

TOPS Toward Other Planetary Systems

TOPSSWG Toward Other Planetary Systems Science Working Group

TPF Terrestrial Planet Finder

UFO unidentified flying object

UV ultraviolet

WBSA Wide Band Spectrum Analyzer

WESTEX The West Coast branch of the National Academy of Sciences

Space Sciences Board Panel on Extraterrestrial Life

Tie jQving Universe

Introduction

In the opening weeks of 1998 a news ar-
ticle in the British journal Nature reported that NASA was about to enter biol-
ogy in a big way. A "virtual" Astrobiology Institute was gearing up for business,
and NASA administrator Dan Goldin told his external advisory council that he
would like to see spending on the new institute eventually reach $100 million
per year. "You just wait for the screaming from the physical scientists [when
that happens]," Goldin was quoted as saying.' Nevertheless, by the time of the
second Astrobiology Science Conference in 2002, attended by seven hundred
scientists from many disciplines, NASA spending on astrobiology had reached
nearly half that amount and was growing at a steady pace. Under NASA lead-
ership numerous institutions around the world applied the latest scientific tech-
niques in the service of astrobiology's ambitious goal: the study of what NASA's
1996 Strategic Plan termed the "living universe." This goal embraced nothing
less than an understanding of the origin, history, and distribution of life in the
universe, including Earth. Astrobiology, conceived as a broad interdisciplinary
research program, held the prospect of being the science for the twenty-first cen-
tury which would unlock the secrets to some of the great questions of humanity.

It is no surprise that these age-old questions should continue into the
twenty-first century. But that the effort should be spearheaded by NASA was
not at all obvious to those — inside and outside the agency — who thought NASA's
mission was human spaceflight, rather than science, especially biological sci-
ence. NASA had, in fact, been involved for four decades in "exobiology," a field
that embraced many of the same questions but which had stagnated after the
1976 Viking missions to Mars. In this volume we tell the colorful story of the
rise of the discipline of exobiology, how and why it morphed into astrobiology
at the end of the twentieth century, and why NASA was the engine for both the
discipline's founding and for its transformation.

Why did NASA plunge into "extraterrestrial biology" and origin of life
research very soon after its formation in 1958? By this time American popular

2 The Living Universe

culture had for decades demonstrated a peculiar fascination with life beyond
Earth, particularly on the red planet Mars. Remnants of the canals of Mars con-
troversy— a theory promulgated by the renegade American astronomer Percival
Lowell, holding that Martians had built canals on their parched and dying
planet — still echoed from a half-century earlier. Orson Welles's 1938 radio dra-
matization of The War of the Worlds, which people found so believable that it
induced panic in the streets, was only twenty years in the past. The modem UFO
craze was only a decade old, and science fiction stories such as Ray Bradbury's
Martian Chronicles were part of popular culture. All of these elements greatly
stimulated American popular interest in the possibility of life on other worlds,
including among some who became NASA scientists. In a more technical sense
already in 1938 the Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin, in his influential book
The Origin of Life, suggested modem biochemical scenarios, testable in a labo-
ratory, to account for the origin of life on a primitive lifeless earth. Scenarios
from Oparin's book formed the basis for the origin of life scenes in Disney's
Fantasia and thereby spread through popular culture. Oparin's book also trig-
gered a generation of researchers who began devising laboratory experiments
to simulate the initial steps in the origin of life. In 1953 University of Chicago
graduate student Stanley Miller convinced his skeptical advisor, geochemist
Harold Urey, that they should undertake an experiment simulating conditions
of a primitive Earth atmosphere; to the astonishment of the experimenters, and
scientists around the world, within a few days the experiment succeeded in pro-
ducing amino acids — the first steps toward life.

All this was in the background when NASA was formed. NASA made
real the search for what had heretofore been science fiction scenarios of life on
other planets and brought with this reality a host of practical problems. Scien-
tists interested in the search for life immediately pointed out that space probes
must be sterilized, lest earthly life brought by the spacecraft themselves con-
taminate the Moon and planets or mix with traces of life detected on these
worlds. The reverse problem of back-contamination of the Earth by extraterres-
trial microbial pathogens also loomed as a possible frightening consequence of
space exploration. Hard-nosed engineers at NASA were skeptical, but forward-
looking biologists had a different point of view. Not only did they take seri-
ously the contamination possibilities; some also saw that the possibility of finding
life or its building blocks in space or on other planets offered an unprecedented
new way to observe the experiment of prebiotic chemistry which had been run
repeatedly under different chemical conditions. With the advent of the means
to explore space, the prospect of developing a tmly universal science of biol-
ogy now seemed possible for the first time.

Although at first NASA had to be convinced of this point of view, once
convinced, the agency acted quickly to bring personnel and their research prob-
lems together into a fledgling program of extraterrestrial biology. This program
was centered around designing actual spacecraft and instraments as well as de-
veloping the basic science necessary to search for life on other planets. At the

Introduction 3

same time, NASA undertook to determine the necessary conditions for the ori-
gin of life anywhere in the universe. Planetary science, extraterrestrial life, and
origin of life research quickly became melded, in less than a decade, into an
unprecedented new scientific discipline: exobiology. Researchers who had pre-
viously had little or no contact were suddenly thrown together, sometimes un-
easily, because of the technical breakthroughs of the Space Age.

Who were these researchers, this first generation of exobiologists? They
included the likes of Carl Sagan, a young astronomer at Harvard and later
Cornell; Stanley Miller, the chemist, fresh from his landmark experiment on
the origin of life and already emphasizing its relevance to space research; and
Joshua Lederberg, a young geneticist who received the Nobel Prize in the same
year that NASA was formed. Three other biochemists were crucial to exo-
biology's early success: Melvin Calvin, soon-to-be Nobelist for his work on pho-
tosynthesis; Norman Horowitz, at CalTech, who brought a particular interest in
Mars and a critical attitude toward Martian life; and Sidney Fox, whose labora-
tory was soon fueled by NASA funding for origin of life research. The goal
of these scientists, among a growing number, was no less than a solution to
the problem of the origin of life and where it might be found in the cosmos. In
effect they began a process that would eventually produce a marriage between
biology and astronomy, or at least certain parts of each discipline. As was the
case for the manned lunar landing program, their vision of exobiology led
to numerous spinoffs: technical breakthroughs, new insights in geology and
astronomy, as well as some of the most important work in twentieth-century
biology. Despite a deeply ambiguous role for biology within NASA, the exo-
biology program generated significant innovative ideas in biology, including
Carl Woese's "three domain" classification for life, Lynn Margulis's heretical
(but now widely accepted) endosymbiosis theory, and James Lovelock's Gaia
hypothesis.

Despite its ambiguous role at NASA, the search for extraterrestrial life
periodically became a driver for the American space program, exerting an in-
fluence that was disproportionate to its funding. From the beginning scientists
and NASA administrators were fully aware of the enormous public relations po-
tential of exobiology: they had grown up themselves enthralled by the promise
of answering age-old questions about origins. Nothing short of putting men into
space captivated public attention like searching for life on Mars. There was noth-
ing more exotic, in all senses of the word, than the idea of extraterrestrial life
or, most of all, extraterrestrial intelligence.^

Yet public relations is a double-edged sword. Almost immediately some
biologists accused exobiology of being a science without a subject. How can
one study extraterrestrial life when none is known to exist? they asked. (Never
mind that those biologists had earthbound research programs and feared loss of
funding if NASA poured large sums of money into exobiology programs, such
as one billion dollars spent on the Viking missions to search for life on Mars.)
Not that such opposition was completely surprising to the exobiology pioneers;

4 The Living Universe

they realized from the beginning the double-edged nature of the public relations
aspect of their subject. Since 1947, when the UFO fascination began to grip
American culture, any discussion of extraterrestrial life or intelligent life
straddled a very thin line between respectable science and a search for "little
green men." Nowhere was this more evident than in the cancellation of con-
gressional funding for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETT) pro-
gram in 1993, when it was targeted as a fanciful waste of money.

Controversial or not, exobiology was not about to disappear. Exobiolo-
gists explicitly claimed as their territory some of the most fundamental ques-
tions of humanity. What is life? How could one claim to recognize life or its
beginnings without a clear-cut definition? Yet in 1960 this was just as much a
matter of contentious debate as it had been in 1660. Indeed, the exobiologists
themselves produced some of the most sharply conflicting ideas, especially while
debating what kind of life-detection devices to send to Mars on the Viking mis-
sion. Has almost a half-century of exobiological research led to any greater con-
sensus in the centuries-old debate over what life is? This book will answer that
question. It goes without saying that origin of life research has been fundamen-
tally transformed by its incorporation into exobiology, not least because it never
had a big funding patron before NASA in 1960.

Exobiology has also given major impetus to planetary science, in particular
the study of Mars and, more recently, the Jovian moon Europa. The claims of
fossiUzed life in the Martian meteorite ALH84001 played an important role in
the rebirth of exobiology as astrobiology, a role that we shall examine in detail.
Similarly, exobiology gave major impetus to the search for planets around other
stars, a search that has intensified with new techniques in astronomy. Why? Be-
cause planets are needed for life, and, especially since the American astrono-
mer Frank Drake first proposed the mathematical likelihood of intelligent life
on other worlds in 1960, one of the variables needed to refme that calculation
is the fraction of stars that have planetary systems. The discovery of new plan-
etary systems in the mid-1990s has given a strong new push to efforts to search
for life, including intelligent life, on other planets. Despite the congressional
cancellation of the SETI program after less than a year of observations, SETI
organizers quickly incorporated their work as a nonprofit group, the SETI In-
stitute, and have continued largely with private donations. In their opinion the
question was too important to be left to politicians.

Exobiology grew into a whole new scientific discipline by merging sev-
eral previously quite disparate streams of research. Far from being a fluke or a
short-lived creation that could only flourish under the relatively large infusion
of money which NASA dispensed in the 1960s and 1970s for the Viking project,
it has contributed significantly to viewing planetary scale processes such as glo-
bal climate in a unified way. Exobiology actually favored interdisciplinary work
that had great difficulty getting funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)
or the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the government agencies that fund
most of the biological research in the United States. Since 1995 exobiology, un-

Introduction 5

der its new rubric of astrobiology, has expanded still further to embrace
genomics, ecological research, and all science on the origin, history, and distri-
bution of life in the universe. Today astrobiology remains a central driving force
at NASA, a question of enduring popular interest, and one of the most impor-
tant riddles of science. Given its fundamental questions, astrobiology is indeed
here to stay.

Part I

'before the ^pace <iAge

Chapter 1

The ^ig Picture

Cosmic Evolution and the Biological Universe

C^is we examine the details of NASA's
central role in exobiology, we must not forget that our story takes place in the
context of several grand themes. At one level it is, to be sure, a story of policy
and politics, as government funding thrust an age-old idea into the arena of public
policy. At another level it is a story of concepts, techniques, and the scientists
who employ them at the outermost limits of the capabilities of science, impelled
by high stakes that dwarf the controversy over Darwinian evolution on Earth.
There is no doubt that the outcome of exobiology's studies will deeply affect
humanity's sense of its place in the universe; as Darwinism placed humanity in
its terrestrial context, so exobiology will place humanity in a cosmic context.
That context — a universe full of microbial life, full of intelligent life, or devoid
of life except for us — may to a large extent determine both humanity's present
worldview and its far future.

None of these themes, however, is more central than the concept of cos-
mic evolution, which provides the grand context within which the enterprise of
exobiology is undertaken. In setting the stage for the history of exobiology and
NASA, it is important, then, that we understand how this concept arose and what
it entails.

The idea of cosmic evolution implies a continuous evolution of the con-
stituent parts of the cosmos from its origins to the present. Planetary evolution,
stellar evolution, and the evolution of galaxies could in theory be seen as dis-
tinct subjects, in which one component evolves but not the other and in which
the parts have no mutual relationships. Indeed, in the first half of the twentieth
century scientists treated the evolution of planets, stars, and galaxies for the most
part as distinct subjects, and historians of science still tend to do so.' But the
amazing and stunning idea that overarches these separate histories is that the
entire universe is evolving, that all of its parts are connected and interact, and
that this evolution applies not only to inert matter but also to life, intelligence,
and even culture. This overarching idea is what is called cosmic evolution, and

10 The Living Universe

the idea has itself evolved to the extent that some modern scientists even
talk of a cosmic ecology, the "life of the cosmos," and the "natural selection"
of universes. -

The concept of cosmic evolution gives rise to many questions. The scien-
tist wants to know how far cosmic evolution proceeds: does it commonly end
with planets, stars, and galaxies, or does it continue on to life, mind, and intel-
ligence? We know of only one case of the latter — on planet Earth. The burning
question is whether cosmic evolution commonly gives rise to life, resulting not
only in an evolving physical universe but also in an evolving "biological uni-
verse." Scientists and historians have seen the idea of a universe full of life as a
kind of worldview similar in status to the Copemican and Darwinian worldviews;
some have even termed it "biocosmology."^ These scientific questions imme-
diately give rise to theological and philosophical questions: is life part of the
"plan" of the universe, or, posed in a more secular way, is life the inherent out-
come of a "biofriendly universe"? All of this is part of the history of the cosmic
evolution debate, which makes the terrestrial evolution debate pale in signifi-
cance, even though it involves us so directly. Cosmic evolution involves us di-
rectly, too, for, while terrestrial evolution addresses our place on Earth, cosmic
evolution addresses our place in the universe. That is why the debate is so pas-
sionate and why philosophical and theological issues such as the nature of life,
the probability of its origin, and the roles of chance and necessity are intertwined
in the terrestrial and cosmic contexts."*

Such a broad scope dictates that any comprehensive history of cosmic evo-
lution encompass everything from the Big Bang to intelligence and culture. One
might say it would have to address not only the physical universe but also the
biological universe and the cultural universe. Such a comprehensive history is,
in fact, just what NASA embraced as part of its exobiology and Search for Ex-
traterrestrial Intelligence (SETT) programs (fig. 1.1). It is important, therefore,
to ask how the concept of cosmic evolution was first extended from the physi-
cal universe to the biological universe and how the idea of a biological universe
evolved during the twentieth century to become a bona fide research program
driven by NASA patronage.

The Birth of "Cosmic Evolution": Astronomers, Biologists,
and Popularizers

Although the question of extraterrestrial life is very old, the concept of a
full-blown cosmic evolution — the connected evolution of planets, stars, galax-
ies, and life on Earth and beyond — is much younger. As historian Michael Crowe
has shown in his study of the plurality of worlds debate, in the nineteenth cen-
tury a combination of ideas — the French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace's
"nebular hypothesis" for the origin of the solar system, the British naturalist Rob-
ert Chambers's application of evolution to other worlds, and Darwinian evolu-
tion on this world — gave rise to the first tentative expressions of parts of this

The Big Picture 1 1

Figure 1.1. Cosmic evolution is depicted in this image from the exobiology program at
NASA Ames Research Center, 1 986. Upper left: the formation of stars, the production of
heavy elements, and the formation of planetary systems, including our own. At left prebiotic
molecules, RNA. and DNA are formed within the first billion years on the primitive Earth.
At center the origin and evolution of life leads to increasing complexity, culminating with
intelligence, technology, and astronomers, upper right, contemplating the universe. The
image was created by David DesMarais, Thomas Scattergood, and Linda Jahnke at NASA
Ames in 1986 and reissued in 1997.

worldview. The philosophy of Herbert Spencer extended it to the evolution of
society, although not to extraterrestrial life or society. But some Spencerians,
notably Harvard philosopher John Fiske in his Outlines of a Cosmic Philoso-
phy Based on the Doctrine of Evolution (1875), did extend evolutionary prin-
ciples to life on other planets.''

Neither astronomers nor biologists tended to embrace such a broad philo-
sophical, and empirically unsupported, concept as full-blown cosmic evolution.
Two astronomers, however, who are better known as popularizers of science,
did propound the rudiments of the idea. In England and the United States Rich-
ard A. Proctor and in France Camille Flammarion were greatly influenced by
Darwinian ideas. In Proctor's Other Worlds than Ours (1870), Our Place among
Infinities, and Science Byways, the latter both published in 1 875, the evolution-
ary view in which all planets would attain life in due time assumed a central
role. By the 1872 edition of Flammarion's La pluralite des mondes the author
shows the deep influence of Darwin. Life began by spontaneous generation,
evolved via natural selection by adaptation to its environment, and was ruled
by survival of the fittest, wherever it was found in the universe. In this scheme

12 The Living Universe

of cosmic evolution anthropocentrism was banished; the Earth was not unique,
and humans were in no sense the highest form of hfe. Flammarion's La pluralite
reached thirty-three editions by 1880 and was reprinted until 1921, while
Proctor's Other Worlds than Ours reached twenty-nine printings by 1909, mak-
ing him the most widely read astronomy writer in the English language. Histo-
rian Bernard Lightman makes the case that such popularizers used the concept
of cosmic evolution to narrate an evolutionary epic long before it was accepted
by scientists or incorporated into any research program. Thus were the general
outlines of the idea of cosmic evolution spread to the populace.^

But a set of general ideas is a long way from a research program. In the
first half-century of the post-Darwinian world cosmic evolution did not find fer-
tile ground among astronomers, who were hard-pressed to find evidence for it.
Spectroscopy, which displayed the distinct "fingerprints" of each of the chemi-
cal elements, revealed to astronomers that these elements were found in the ter-
restrial and celestial realms. This discovery confirmed the widely assumed idea
of "uniformity of nature," that both nature's laws and its materials were every-
where the same. Astronomers recognized and advocated parts of cosmic evolu-
tion, as in the British astrophysicist Norman Lockyer's work on the evolution
of the elements and the American astronomer George Ellery Hale's Study of Stel-
lar Evolution in 1908; in this and his other published writings Hale stuck very
much to the techniques for studying the evolution of the physical universe. Even
Percival Lowell's Evolution of Worlds (1909) spoke of the evolution of the physi-
cal universe, not the biological universe, Martian canals notwithstanding. Al-
though Lowell was a Spencerian, had been influenced by Fiske at Harvard and
had addressed his graduating class on the "Nebular Hypothesis" two years after
Fiske's Cosmic Philosophy (1874), he did not apply the idea of advanced civi-
lizations to the universe at large. Even in the first half of the twentieth century
astronomers had to be content with the uniformity of nature argument confirmed
by spectroscopy. In an article in Science in 1920 the American astronomer
W. W. Campbell (a great opponent of Lowell's canalled Mars) enunciated ex-
actly this general idea of widespread life via the uniformity of nature argument:
"If there is a unity of materials, unity of laws governing those materials through-
out the universe, why may we not speculate somewhat confidently upon life
universal?" he asked. He even spoke of "other stellar systems . . . with degrees
of intelligence and civilization from which we could leam much, and with which
we could sympathize." That was about all the astronomers of the time could
say.^

For the most part biologists were also reluctant cosmic evolutionists. Two
points of view at the turn of the century demonstrate this reluctance. The first
was that of none other than the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, co-
founder with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, who wrote Man 's Place
in the Universe: A Study of the Results of Scientific Research in Relation to the
Unity or Plurality of Worlds in 1903. Wallace concluded: "Our position in the
material universe is special and probably unique, and ... it is such as to lend

The Big Picture 13

support to the view, held by many great thinkers and writers today, that the su-
preme end and purpose of this vast universe was the production and develop-
ment of the living soul in the perishable body of man." With regard to life on
Earth, in stark contrast to Darwin, Wallace did not believe that the evolution of
the human brain could be due to natural selection. And with respect to the bio-
logical universe, in an "additional argument dependent on the theory of evolu-
tion" added to the 1904 edition of Wallace's book, he argued that, because
humanity is the result of a long chain of modifications in organic life, because
these modifications occur only under special circumstances, and because the
chances of the same conditions and modifications occurring elsewhere in the
universe are very small, the chances of beings in human form existing on other
planets is very small. Moreover, since no other animal on Earth approached the
intelligent or moral nature of humanity, Wallace concluded that intelligence in
any other form was also highly improbable. How improbable? He set the physical
and cosmic improbabilities at a million to one, the evolutionary improbabilities
at a hundred million to one, giving the total chances against the evolution of an
equivalent moral or intellectual being to man, on any other planet, as a hundred
million million to one. Clearly, for Wallace — for this pioneer in evolution by
natural selection — there was no cosmic evolution in its fullest sense — that is to
say, no biological universe.^

The second biologist especially relevant here is Lawrence J. Henderson,
a professor of biological chemistry at Harvard and first president of the History
of Science Society. In 1913, ten years after Wallace, he wrote a now classic book
The Fitness of the Environment, subtitled "An Inquiry into the Biological Sig-
nificance of the Properties of Matter." In it Henderson investigated how the en-
vironment on Earth became fit for life. He closed with a chapter on "Life and
the Cosmos," which ended with these words: "There is . . . one scientific con-
clusion which I wish to put forward as a positive statement and, I trust, fruitful
outcome of the present investigation. The properties of matter and the course
of cosmic evolution are now seen to be intimately related to the structure of the
living being and to its activities; they become, therefore, far more important in
biology than has been previously suspected. For the whole evolutionary pro-
cess, both cosmic and organic, is one, and the biologist may now rightly regard
the universe in its very essence as biocentric." Clearly, Henderson grasped es-
sential elements of cosmic evolution, used its terminology, and believed that his
research into the fitness of the environment pointed in that direction. Yet, al-
though he had a productive career at Harvard until his death in 1942, Henderson
never enunciated a full-blown concept of cosmic evolution, nor did any of his
astronomical colleagues.'

Henderson's idea of cosmic evolution in 1913 was largely stillborn, per-
haps in part because just a few years later James Jeans's theory of the forma-
tion of planetary systems by close stellar encounters convinced the public, and
most scientists, that planetary systems were extremely rare. The idea remained
entrenched until the mid- 1940s. Without planetary systems cosmic evolution

14 The Living Universe

was stymied at the level of the innumerable stars, well short of the biological
universe. In the absence of evidence cosmic evolution was left to science fic-
tion writers such as Olaf Stapledon, whose Last and First Men and Star Maker
novels in the 1930s embraced it in colorful terms. But Henderson had caught
the essence of a great idea — that life and the material universe were closely
linked, a fundamental tenet of cosmic evolution which would lay dormant for
almost a half-century.

Cosmic Evolution Becomes a Research Program

The humble and sporadic origins of the idea of cosmic evolution demon-
strate that it did not have to become what is surely the leading overarching prin-
ciple of twentieth-century astronomy, yet it did. Almost all astronomers today
view cosmic evolution as a continuous story from the Big Bang to the evolu-
tion of intelligence, accepting as proven the evolution of the physical universe
while leaving open the still unproven question of the biological universe, whose
sole known exemplar remains the planet Earth. Today the central question re-
mains how far cosmic evolution commonly proceeds. Does it end with the evo-
lution of matter, the evolution of life, the evolution of intelligence, or the
evolution of culture? But today, by contrast with 1950, cosmic evolution is the
guiding conceptual scheme for a substantial research program.

When and how did astronomers and biologists come to believe in cosmic
biological evolution as a guiding principle for their work, and how did it be-
come a serious research program? The answer is that only in the 1950s and 1960s
did the cognitive elements — planetary science, planetary systems science, ori-
gin of life studies, and SETI — combine to form a robust theory of cosmic evo-
lution as well as provide an increasing amount of evidence for it. Only then,
and increasingly thereafter, were there serious claims for disciplinary status for
a field known alternatively as exobiology, astrobiology, and bioastronomy, the
biological universe component of cosmic evolution. And only then did govern-
ment funding become available, as the space program embraced the search for
life as one of the primary goals of space science and cosmic evolution became
public policy.

We have already hinted at why this coalescence had not happened earlier,
Spencerian philosophy, and the ideas of Flammarion, Proctor, and Henderson
notwithstanding. Although the idea of the physical evolution of planets and bio-
logical evolution of life on those planets in our solar system had been around
for a while — and even some evidence in the form of seasonal changes and spec-
troscopic evidence of vegetation on Mars — not until the space program did the
technology become available, resulting in large amounts of government fund-
ing being poured into planetary science so that these tentative conclusions could
be further explored. Moreover, if evolution was truly to be conceived as a cos-
mic phenomenon, planetary systems outside our solar system were essential.
Therein was the problem for much of the first half of the century. That innu-

The Big Picture 15

merable planets might exist was an implication of Laplace's nebular hypoth-
esis: if planets really formed as the normal by-product of a rotating cloud dur-
ing stellar evolution, then they should be extremely common. The nebular
hypothesis was eclipsed for the first four decades of the century, however, by a
variety of hypotheses claiming that planets formed by the close encounter of
stars — the so-called tidal theory, in which material was pulled out of the star to
form planets. Because such close encounters would be extremely rare events,
planetary systems would be extremely rare. Only in the 1940s, when the tidal
theory was shown to be flawed and the nebular hypothesis came back into vogue,
could an abundance of planetary systems once again be postulated. During a
fifteen-year period from 1943 to 1958 the commonly accepted frequency of plan-
etary systems in the galaxy went from one hundred to one billion, a difference
of seven orders of magnitude. The turnaround involved many arguments, from
the observations of a few possible planetary companions in 1943, to binary star
statistics, the nebular hypothesis, and stellar rotation rates. Helping matters along
was the dean of American astronomers, Henry Norris Russell, whose 1943 Sci-
entific American article "Anthropocentrism's Demise" enthusiastically embraced
numerous planetary systems based on just a few observations by Kaj Strand and
others. By 1963 the American astronomer Peter van de Kamp announced his
discovery of a planet around Barnard's star, and the planet chase was on, to be
truly successful only at the end of the century.'"

Thus was one more step in cosmic evolution made plausible by mid-
century, even though it was a premature and optimistic idea, since only in 1995
were the first planets found around Sun-like stars, and those were gas giants
such as Jupiter. But how about life? That further step awaited developments in
biochemistry, in particular the Oparin-Haldane theory of chemical evolution for
the origin of life. The first paper on the origins of life by the Russian biochem-
ist Aleksandr Ivanovich Oparin was written in 1924, elaborated in the 1936 book
Origin of Life, and reached the English world in a 1938 translation. By that time
the British geneticist and biochemist J. B. S. Haldane had provided a brief in-
dependent account of the origin of life similar to Oparin's chemical theory. Both
Oparin and Haldane were Marxists, and, as Loren Graham and others have
pointed out, their worldview may have affected their science. By 1940, when
the British Astronomer Royal, Sir Harold Spencer Jones, wrote Life on Other
Worlds, he remarked, "It seems reasonable to suppose that whenever in the Uni-
verse the proper conditions arise, life must inevitably come in to existence.""

The contingency or necessity of life would be one of the great scientific
and philosophical questions of cosmic evolution, but in any case the Oparin-
Haldane chemical theory of origin of life provided a basis for experimentation,
beginning with the famous experiment of Stanley Miller and Harold Urey in
1953 in which amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and life, were synthe-
sized under possible primitive Earth conditions. By the mid-1950s another step of
cosmic evolution was coming into focus: the possibility of primitive life. Again,
optimism was premature, but the point is that it set off numerous experiments

16 The Living Universe

around the world to verify another step in cosmic evolution. Already in 1954
Harvard biochemist George Wald proclaimed the Oparin-Haldane process a natu-
ral and inevitable event, not just on our planet but on any planet similar to Earth
in size and temperature. By 1956 Oparin had teamed with Russian astronomer
V. Fesenkov to write Life in the Universe, which expressed the same view of
the inevitability of life as Wald's.'-

What remained was the possible evolution of intelligence in the universe.
Although hampered by a lack of understanding of how this had happened on
Earth, discussion of the evolution of intelligence in the universe was spurred
on by the famous paper by the American physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip
Morrison in Nature in 1959. "Searching for Interstellar Communications"
showed how the detection of radio transmissions was feasible with radio tele-
scope technology already in hand. In the following year astronomer Frank Drake,
a recent Harvard graduate, undertook just such a project (Ozma) at the National
Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), ushering in a series of attempts around
the world to detect such transmissions. And in 1961 Drake, supported by NRAO
director Otto Struve, convened the first conference on interstellar communica-
tion at Green Bank, West Virginia. Although it was a small conference attended
by only eleven people including Struve, there were representatives from the
astronomy community (Carl Sagan and Su Shu Huang, along with Drake), the
biological community (Melvin Calvin, whose Nobel Prize for his work on photo-
synthetic mechanisms was announced while the meeting was in session), physi-
cists (Cocconi and Morrison), an engineer (Barney Oliver, later of SETI fame),
and even a medical doctor who had experimented with interspecies communi-
cations in the form of dolphins (John C. Lilly). '^ Thus, by 1961 the elements
of the full-blown cosmic evolution debate were in place.

It was at the Green Bank meeting that the now famous Drake equation
was first formulated. The equation N = R« x fp x n^. x fi x fj x f^, x L — purport-
ing to estimate the number (AO of technological civilizations in the galaxy —
eventually became the icon of cosmic evolution, showing in one compact
equation not only the astronomical and biological aspects of cosmic evolution
but also its cultural aspects. The first three terms represented the number of stars
in the galaxy which had formed planets with environments suitable for life; the
next two terms narrow the number to those on which life and intelligence actu-
ally develop; and the final two represent radio communicative civilizations. L,
representing the lifetime of a technological civilization, embodied the success
or failure of cultural evolution. Drake and most others in the field recognized
that this equation is a way of organizing our ignorance. At the same time,
progress has been made on at least one of its parameters; the fraction of stars
with planets (/J,) is now known to be between 5 and 10 percent for gas giant
planets around solar- type stars.

The adoption of cosmic evolution was by no means solely a Western phe-
nomenon. On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Sputnik Soviet radio as-
tronomer Joseph Shklovskii wrote Universe, Life, Mind {\962). When elaborated

The Big Picture 1 7

and published in 1 966 as Intelligent Life in the Universe by Carl Sagan, it be-
came the bible for cosmic evolutionists interested in the search for life. Nor was
Shklovskii's book an isolated instance of Russian interest. As early as 1964, the
Russians convened their own meetings on extraterrestrial civilizations, funded
their own observing programs, and published extensively on the subject.''*

Thus, cosmic biological evolution first had the potential to become a re-
search program in the early 1960s, when its cognitive elements — planetary sci-
ence, planetary systems science, origin of life studies, and radio astronomy — had
developed enough to become experimental and observational sciences and when
the researchers in these disciplines first realized they held the key to a larger
problem that could not be resolved by any one part but, rather, only by all of
them working together. At first this was a very small number of researchers,
but it has expanded greatly over the years, especially under NASA patronage.
The idea was effectively spread beyond the scientific community by a variety
of astronomers. As early as 1958, cosmic evolution was being popularized by
Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley in Of Stars and Men; it spread even more
widely by the publication of Sagan's Cosmos (1980), Eric Chaisson's Cosmic
Dawn: The Origins of Matter and Life (1981), and in France by Hubert Reeves's
Patience dans I'azur: L'evolution cosmique (1981), among others.'^ By the end
of the twentieth century cosmic evolution was viewed as playing out on an in-
comparably larger stage than what had been conceived by A. R. Wallace a cen-
tury before.

-Zhe establishment of cosmic biological evolution as a research program
can also be gauged by the claims of its practitioners, realizing, of course, that a
certain amount of self-interest is at play in proclaiming one's subject a valid
discipline if one is seeking federal funding. Even in the late 1950s one could
argue that the study of cosmic evolution was not at all a connected research pro-
gram in the sense that those interested in it had a common goal. Planetary sci-
ence, planetary systems science, origin of life studies, and SETI remained largely
separate research programs, undertaken by different groups of scientists. Aside
from the shared general culture of astronomy, the planetary spectroscopy of
Gerard Kuiper and William Sinton had little in common with Peter van de
Kamp's astrometric studies of stellar motions or Frank Drake's radio astronomy
in terms of technique, research programs, and even goals, while all three areas
were removed from the biochemists and geochemists in their laboratories study-
ing the origins of life. And, certainly, most members of all these groups dis-
avowed the popular culture aspects of the debate, including UFOs — although
many were interested in science fiction.

The catalyst for the unified research program of cosmic evolution, and
for the birth of a new scientific discipline, was the space age. No one would
claim that a field of extraterrestrial life studies, or cosmic evolution, existed in
the first half of the twentieth century. Even by 1955, when Otto Struve pon-
dered the use of the word astrobiology to describe the broad study of life beyond

18 The Living Universe

the Earth, he explicitly decided against establishing a new discipline: "The time
is probably not yet ripe to recognize such a completely new discipline within
the framework of astronomy. The basic facts of the origin of life on Earth are
still vague and uncertain; and our knowledge of the physical conditions on Ve-
nus and Mars is insufficient to give us a reliable background for answering the
question" of life on other worlds. But the imminent birth of "exobiology" was
palpable in 1960, when Joshua Lederberg coined the term and set forth an am-
bitious but practical agenda based on space exploration in his article in Science,
"Exobiology: Experimental Approaches to Life beyond the Earth." Over the next
twenty years numerous such proclamations of a new discipline were made. By
1979 NASA's SETI chief, John Billingham, wrote that "over the past twenty
years, there has emerged a new direction in science, that of the study of life
outside the Earth, or exobiology. Stimulated by the advent of space programs,
this fledgling science has now evolved to a stage of reasonable maturity and
respectability."'*

The extent to which NASA had served as the chief patron of cosmic bio-
logical evolution is evident in its sponsorship of many of the major conferences
on extraterrestrial life, although the Academies of Science of the United States
and the USSR were also prominent supporters. It was NASA that adopted exo-
biology as one of the prime goals of space science, and it was from NASA that
funding would come, despite an early but abortive interest at the National Sci-
ence Foundation.'^ As we shall see, pushed by prominent biologists such as
Joshua Lederberg, beginning already in the late 1950s, soon after its origin,
NASA poured a small but steady stream of money into exobiology and the life
sciences in general. In the early 1960s Lederberg, Sidney Fox, Melvin Calvin,
and Wolfgang Vishniac were only the most prominent among a rapidly expanding
number of researchers receiving grants of hundreds of thousands of dollars,
prompting evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson to complain about "ex-
biologists" siphoning off funding for more realistic research. In the same paper
he opined that exobiology was a "'science' that has yet to demonstrate that its
subject matter exists!"'^ By 1976 $100 million had been spent on the Viking bi-
ology experiments designed to search for life on Mars from two spacecraft
landers. Even as exobiology saw a slump in the 1980s in the aftermath of the
Viking failure to detect life on Mars unambiguously, NASA kept exobiology alive
with a grant program at the level of $10 million per year and with the largest
exobiology laboratory in the world at its Ames Research Center. Cosmic
evolution's potential by the early 1960s to become a research program was con-
verted to reality by NASA funding.

This is true not only of NASA's exobiology laboratory and grants pro-
gram but also of its SETI program. Bom at Ames in the late 1960s quite sepa-
rately from the exobiology program, NASA SETI expended some $55 million
prior to its termination by Congress in 1993. It was the NASA SETI program
that was the flag bearer of cosmic evolution. As it attempted to determine how

The Big Picture 19

Figure 1.2. Cosmic evolution, as it appeared in the Roadmap for NASA's Office of Space
Science Origins theme, 1997. The origins theme there is described as following the fifteen-
biiUon-year-long chain of events from the birth of the universe at the Big Bang, through
the formation of chemical elements, galaxies, stars, and planets, through the mixing of
chemicals and energy that cradles life on Earth, to the earliest self-replicating organisms —
and the profusion of hfe. (Courtesy NASA.)

many planets might have evolved intelligent life, all of the parameters of cos-
mic evolution, as encapsulated in the Drake equation, came into play.

With the demise of a pubhcly funded NASA SETI program in 1993, the
research program of cosmic evolution did not end. The remnants of the NASA
SETI program were kept alive with private funding, and similar, if smaller, SETI
endeavors are still carried out around the world. Within NASA a truncated pro-
gram of cosmic evolution continued, with its images subtly changed. In 1995
NASA announced its Origins program, which two years later it described in its
Origins Roadmap as "following the 15 billion year long chain of events from
the birth of the universe at the Big Bang, through the formation of chemical
elements, galaxies, stars, and planets, through the mixing of chemicals and en-
ergy that cradles life on Earth, to the earliest self-replicating organisms — and
the profusion of life." Any depiction of "intelligence" is conspicuously absent
from the new imagery (fig. 1.2), for, thanks to congressional action, program-
matically it could no longer be supported with public funding. With this procla-
mation of a new Origins program, cosmic evolution became the organizing
principle for most of NASA's space science effort.

In 1996 the Astrobiology program was added to NASA's lexicon. The
NASA Astrobiology Institute, centered at NASA's Ames Research Center, funds

20 The Living Universe

some fifteen other centers for research in astrobiology at the level of several
tens of millions of dollars. Its paradigm is also cosmic evolution, even if it also
carefully avoids mention of extraterrestrial intelligence. No such restriction is
evident at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, headed by Frank
Drake. The institute has under its purview tens of millions of dollars in grants,
all geared to answering various parameters of the Drake equation, the embodi-
ment of cosmic evolution, including the search for intelligence.

As we enter the twenty-first century there is no doubt about the existence
of a robust cosmic evolution research program. NASA is its primary patron, and
even many scientists without government funding now see their work in the con-
text of this research program. Other agencies, including the European Space
Agency, are also funding research essentially in line with the Origins and As-
trobiology programs. Beginning in the 1960s, all the elements of a new disci-
pline gradually came into place: the cognitive elements, the funding resources,
and the community and communications structures common to new disciplines.
In 1979 a new Commission on Bioastronomy was formed in the prestigious In-
ternational Astronomical Union; the International Society for the Study of the
Origin of Life routinely incorporates exobiology in its meetings; and a variety
of other societies also embrace exobiology. Already in 1968 the journal Ori-
gins of Life (now Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere) began publi-
cation, and in the new century two new journals devoted to the more general
field of astrobiology have begun publication. Numerous universities offer courses
on life in the universe, and there is at least one university (the University of
Washington in Seattle) now offering a graduate program in astrobiology. In the
early years of the twenty-first century cosmic evolution is a thriving enterprise,
providing the framework for an expansive research program, drawing in young
talent sure to perpetuate a new field of science which a half-century ago was
nonexistent.

Part II

J^rom (Jputnik to
l^iking, 1957-1976

Chapter 2

Organizing Exobiology

NASA Enters Life Science

Oxobiology did not exist, either in name
or substance, before the dawn of the Space Age. Nonetheless, in less than two
decades it had become a fully fledged scientific discipline. How could such a
transformation come about so rapidly, and who were the major players involved
in creating this new discipline? In an era in which "big science" had become
the acknowledged standard, large-scale patronage was crucial. For exobiology
the new American space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Adminis-
tration, played a key role, though not nearly at the same level as in its manned
space program or even its other space science projects. The story of how indi-
vidual scientists tailored their careers to encompass research in exobiology as
they attempted to negotiate the increasingly complex landscape of large federal
science agencies is as colorful as the varied personalities involved. This chap-
ter introduces some of these personalities while describing the evolving land-
scape of federal science grants, the science it supported, and some of the larger
questions surrounding the creation of exobiology.

Beginnings

In early November 1957 the microbiologist Joshua Lederberg visited the
famous geneticist J. B. S. Haldane at Haldane's new home in India. Lederberg,
only thirty-two, would win the Nobel Physiology / Medicine Prize in less than
a year for his pioneering work on bacterial genetics, and he held a long-stand-
ing interest in the origin of life. Haldane, much the senior of the two scientists,
was one of the British scientific socialist circle of the 1930s and 1940s, and he
had written a seminal paper on the chemical origin of life in 1929. Both men
were awed by the rapid advent of rocketry and the recent launch of the first
two Soviet Sputniks. As Lederberg tells the story, over dinner on the evening of
6 November, waiting to see a lunar eclipse that night, they speculated on whether

24 The Living Universe

the Soviets might detonate a nuclear explosion on the darkened part of the moon,
"put a red star on the moon," to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik
Revolution. Although their fear did not materialize that night, the potential for
reckless use of the new technology continued to disturb both men.'

A month later Lederberg was back in the United States, circulating two
memos to a hundred or more prominent scientists and to the National Academy
of Sciences (NAS), speculating on the possibilities of "cosmic microbiology"
and "lunar biology." Lederberg was concerned that a totally unique opportunity,
the scientific search for life, including microorganisms, on the moon and other
planets was in real danger of being thrown away because of a politically moti-
vated stunt. Crashing a spacecraft on the moon as quickly as possible to prove
technological prowess would hopelessly contaminate the moon with earthly or-
ganisms and/or their chemical building blocks, Lederberg argued.'^ If the space-
craft, like Sputnik 2, contained a live dog, the problem would be a million times
worse. Although doing so would slow down the attempt to be "first to reach the
moon," it was vital to develop procedures to sterilize lunar and interplanetary
satellites, he argued forcefully, lest a priceless scientific opportunity be irretriev-
ably lost.

In the wake of Sputnik and the opening of the Space Age, biologists around
the world began to speculate about what this new technology would mean for
the life sciences. Those interested in extraterrestrial life, of course, saw imme-
diately that for the first time their subject could be studied in more than just a
theoretical way. But origin of life research got as much or even more of an elec-
trifying stimulus from the launching of space vehicles. And within a decade,
with NASA as matchmaker, the two fields had been wed, merged together to
create a new discipline, exobiology. So exhilarating was the wedding that by
the early 1970s hardly anyone could imagine that working on the origin of life
problem had not always been part and parcel of the search for life on other
planets.

On 29 July 1958 President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National
Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA as the U.S. space agency. By that
time Lederberg had interested Hugh Dryden, the first NASA deputy adminis-
trator, in the problem of preventing extraterrestrial contamination and search-
ing for native life forms on the moon and planets. Dryden immediately asked
the National Academy of Sciences to set up a Space Sciences Board (SSB) to
advise NASA. And Lederberg was made head of the SSB's subpanel on extra-
terrestrial life. Lederberg had not been idle; he kept up his campaign to alert
scientists to the contamination threat in an article in Science called "Moondust."^
And he recruited like-minded scientists to staff the NAS SSB, looking especially
for young talents who were coming up during the space age, such as the astron-
omer Carl Sagan.

Lederberg was frustrated with the stodgy, conservative, nationalistic atti-
tudes of many of the older scientists. He was constantly having run-ins with
curmudgeonly physicist Phil Abelson, for many years editor of Science, because

Organizing Exobiology 25

of Abelson's skepticism that there was any life out there in the cosmos." In April
1961 Abelson declared to the National Academy of Sciences: "In looking for
life on Mars we could establish for ourselves the reputation of being the great-
est Simple Simons of all time."^

Sagan was another matter. He met Lederberg when living in Madison, Wis-
consin, in 1958, while still a twenty-four-year-old doctoral student at nearby
Yerkes Observatory. Ever since his science fiction reading days as a child, Sagan
had been an enthusiast of extraterrestrial life. He sat in on Harold Urey's lec-
tures as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, just at the time when
Urey's graduate student Stanley Miller was making international headlines for
his experiment producing amino acids under primitive Earth conditions. And
ever since Sagan had viewed his own mission in science as nothing less than
"extending Miller's results to astronomy."* Sagan had also shown a talent from
his undergraduate years as an explainer and popularizer of science as well as a
scientist.^ And, surely, given the extraordinary level of public interest in NASA
and the international "space race" and the extraordinary level of funds at NASA's
disposal, Lederberg saw that advancing his scientific agenda would benefit most
if both the public and NASA accepted the importance of understanding the ori-
gin of life and the search for life on other worlds. Lederberg introduced Sagan
to NASA people and got him involved on the ground floor of developing exo-
biology in 1959.^

With his new Nobel Prize in hand, in the fall of 1958 Lederberg had moved
to the Stanford Medical School to set up a new genetics department. From there
he argued that the NAS SSB subpanel on extraterrestrial life would work most
effectively if it met as an East Coast group (EASTEX) and a West Coast group
(WESTEX), and he urged the groups to get to work as quickly as possible.^
EASTEX first met 19-20 December 1958 at MIT.'O WESTEX convened shortly
thereafter, on 21 February 1959 at the Stanford Biophysics Department, with
Lederberg as the prime moving force. The WESTEX group also included, among
others, Harold Urey, Carl Sagan, molecular biologists Gunther Stent and Matt
Meselson, geneticist Norman Horowitz, biochemist Melvin Calvin, and micro-
biologist C. B. Van Niel. Several of them had written important papers on origin
of life, Calvin, Horowitz and Urey having given papers at the first International
Conference on the subject, in Moscow in 1957. Van Niel was among those who
had first emphasized the importance of the distinction between prokaryotic and
eukaryotic cells; from 1930 to 1962 dozens and dozens of students who would
later become the most influenfial biologists of two generations took his sum-
mer course on General Microbiology at Stanford University's Marine Station."

The August 1957 Moscow conference, just before Sputnik, shows that ori-
gin of life research had been growing, if ever so slowly, before the Space Age.
In the spring of 1953, just three weeks after Watson and Crick's famous paper
on DNA structure was published, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey's equally fa-
mous paper on creating the chemical building blocks of life in the laboratory
appeared.'^ Miller had simulated the presumed atmosphere of the early Earth

26 The Living Universe

in a closed flask, added heat and a spark discharge, and found that after only a
few days amino acids and other complex organic molecules had formed in the
flask (fig. 2.1). At about the same time Sidney Fox was working on the reac-
tions that amino acids undergo, once formed, under conditions relevant to the
early Earth. '^ And Alexander Oparin in the Soviet Union had been working since
the 1930s on experiments with chemical systems called coacervates, trying to
model early stages of the origin of complex membrane-bounded structures from
simple precursor molecules (fig. 12)}'' All three men were in on the beginning
of a new upsurge of interest in exploring the origin of life question experimen-
tally. Indeed, Oparin's book The Origin of Life, first appearing in English in 1938,
had been a major stimulus in the early thinking of Fox, Horowitz, Lederberg,
and a handful of others who revived this research in the years after World War
11.'^ But the field had been sparsely funded, to put it mildly. Stanley Miller has
written that his entire experiment was carried out largely by "bootlegging" funds
from other grants that his advisor Urey had received; the equipment and sup-
plies did not exceed a thousand dollars. In addition. Miller himself had a teach-
ing assistantship from the University of Chicago his first year and an NSF
graduate student fellowship of about fifteen hundred dollars for his second and
third years.'*

It was Oparin who organized the 1957 Moscow conference, bringing to-
gether for the first time the scattered workers around the globe who saw their
research as relevant to the origin of life question.'^ The conference convened in
August of that year, amid the tensions of the Cold War. Oparin had explicitly
stated that dialectical materialism was important to his research agenda and had
been a supporter of the Soviet biologist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, as Loren
Graham has shown. '^ It was only two years since the first Soviet megaton-scale
hydrogen bomb explosion, only three months since the first British thermonuclear
bomb test, and the conference had barely ended when the TASS News Agency
announced that the Soviet Union had just successfully tested the first intercon-
tinental ballistic missile (ICBM), launching it over four thousand miles. Barely
six weeks later those tensions heightened to a fever pitch with the launching of
Sputnik 1. Yet, even before the Moscow meeting took place, the scientists at-
tending could not fail to see it in a Cold War context. For the Americans who
had been invited, the most palpable evidence of this involved visits from U.S.
government intelligence officers inquiring about their intentions and requesting
that they bring back any information about Soviet science which might be use-
ful to their country. Erwin Chargaff, the distinguished biochemist, described be-
ing approached by these figures with his usual sarcastic wit. He found their
request insulting and their low level of comprehension of science appalling.'^
One can only guess that Linus Pauling's reaction may have been similar, since
he had been denied a visa to go to a conference just a few years before because
of his activities publicizing fallout dangers from nuclear weapons testing. Stanley
Miller on the other hand, only twenty-seven years old at the time, agreed to keep

Figure 2. 1 . Stanley L. Miller with one of his flasks enclosing a simulated primitive Earth
atmosphere, February 1970. (Courtesy S. L. Miller.)

28 The Living Universe

Figure 2.2. AleksiindrOparin (left), the preeminent Russian origin of life researcher, and
Cyril Ponnamperuma [right), head of the chemical evolution branch of exobiology at
NASA Ames. c. 1964 (NASA photo, courtesy Linda Caren.)

his eyes and ears open and report whether he learned anything interesting. In
the event there was little to learn except the names and personalities of the So-
viet scientists at the conference, according to Miller.-*'

But, whatever the skepticism of the scientists about such notions, the fear
of CIA agents that the Soviets, led by the world-famous Oparin, might possess
some important lead in origin of life research, might even be close to creating

Organizing Exobiology 29

life in the laboratory, was in the air. Thus, when NASA was formed in 1958,
the epitome of Cold War science institutions, with the goal of catching up to
the Russians in science, it is perhaps not quite so surprising that Lederberg and
others so quickly convinced the new space agency that origin of life was an
important area to investigate.^'

It was Lederberg who first coined the term exobiology to include research
into the origins of life on Earth and the development of instruments and meth-
ods to search for signs of life in the cosmos. He reasoned that one needed to
know what conditions were necessary for life to begin on Earth in order to know
how and where to search for life on other worlds. The term neatly encompassed
the areas Lederberg found interesting in a package he felt sure would be funded
from NASA's abundant coffers. He first used the term in private letters as early
as June 1959, in a public talk in January 1960, and in print (in Science) in Au-
gust of that year.-^^ Lederberg contrasted exobiology with eobiology (Earth's
own), but, whereas the former term caught on very quickly, the latter never did.
The very popularity of the term exobiology shows what keen instincts Lederberg
had for recognizing that the time was right to combine two previously unre-
lated, and relatively offbeat, areas of research and to do so under the aegis of
NASA in a way that gave to both high prestige, copious funding, and a cutting-
edge profile. Exobiology had its critics, some from the very outset, but it made
newspaper headlines immediately, and it has remained prominent in the public
imagination ever since.

Thus, when NASA first officially created a Life Sciences office on 1 March
1960, the field as Lederberg defined it was assumed from the beginning, and
under the name exobiology, to be firmly within its purview. This included mak-
ing research on sterilizing space vehicles to avoid contaminating other worlds a
priority. And, as soon as missions to return from the moon began to be planned,
the same expertise was directed toward protecting against "back contamination,"
or the inadvertent return of possible cosmic microbes to Earth that could per-
haps allow Andromeda Strain scenarios to develop.^^ Few scientists, surely, have
ever seen their objectives, both scientific and policy-oriented ones, converted
into reality so completely and so quickly by a government agency as happened
with Lederberg and exobiology. The question still remained, however: could an
entire scientific discipline, just because it was dreamed up by one man (even if
a very smart man) flourish for long? How would workers in many different dis-
ciplines, from astronomy to geochemistry to microbiology, come together to es-
tablish journals, professional societies, and the other trappings usually thought
necessary for a scientific discipline to become established?^"*

From the start many academic biologists criticized the putafive discipline,
saying that, because there is no known life on other worlds, its creafion amounted
to establishing a field of science that has no subject matter. ^^ Chief among these
critics was George Gaylord Simpson, who called advocates "ex-biologists turned
exobiologists." He noted, not incidentally, that such a chase after pure imaginings
would divert resources away from Earth-bound biology research. This debate

30 The Living Universe

took place at the time when E. O. Wilson has described the evolutionary biology
he and Simpson practiced as already in danger of extinction because of com-
petitive pressure from the newly burgeoning field of molecular biology.^* Then,
too, because the UFO craze had been sweeping the country since 1947, from
its inception exobiology walked a fine line between being perceived as being at
the cutting edge of futuristic science and seeming to be, in the public eye, a
"search for little green men."^'

Lederberg had worries that the relationship with NASA and the publicity
that went with it could cut both ways. As his diary records in mid-1959: "I
wanted to avoid as far as possible contact with and support of the Man in Space
program. ... I don't want to see exobiology tag along after the military."^^ The
very size and political nature of much of NASA's Cold War mission made some
of its programs unwieldy behemoths more subject to the capriciously changing
winds of Congress. And the man-in-space effort of all NASA projects was per-
haps most obviously political rather than scientific, as Audra Wolfe has pointed
out.^' By emphasizing that exobiology was a pure science program, Lederberg
hoped to keep its science from being manipulated in the interest of national pres-
tige, as Project Mercury was from start to finish.^° In this respect Norm Horowitz
heartily concurred with him, helping bring to bear pressure from CalTech big
shots, through science advisors George Kistiakowsky and Lee DuBridge. By May
1960 he wrote to Lederberg, quite concerned about any good science (such as
serious exobiology) disappearing from view in the public's wild ideas of NASA
and its programs. "I think this is a good time to put pressure on [NASA admin-
istrator Keith] Glennan from all sides," Horowitz concluded.^'

The first exobiology grant money from NASA was awarded in March
1959, before the Life Sciences office even got organized. Microbiologist Wolf
Vishniac of Yale Medical School, a member of the EASTEX committee, was
awarded forty-five hundred dollars to begin developing a device that could de-
tect microorganisms living in the soil of another planet.^^ Vishniac developed
the device in response to a challenge from the astronomer Thomas Gold at the
very first EASTEX meeting; he called it the "Wolf Trap." Like everyone else,
Vishniac imagined the first place the device might actually detect extraterres-
trial life was on Mars. And, indeed, Vishniac's design was one of four selected
a decade later to fly on the Viking Mars lander mission.

Like many young scientists, Vishniac may have had some qualms about
becoming involved in NASA work because it did not fit very neatly within the
established disciplines that usually evaluate one's work for tenure, promotion,
and grants from more traditional agencies such as the National Science Foun-
dation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This was a tension
that persisted for at least twenty years. But the early generosity of NASA to
academic scientists willing to join in the exobiology venture was more than
enough motivation for many of the best and brightest in their fields to take the
plunge. Among them were several Nobel Prize winners, including Lederberg,
Calvin, Urey, H. J. Muller, Fritz Lipmann, George Wald, M. Keffer Hartline,

Organizing Exobiology 3 J

and Manfred Eigen. Many of them had read and been deeply impressed by
Oparin's book The Origin of Life after it first appeared in English in 1938, as
had biochemical geneticist Norman Horowitz and protein chemist Sidney Fox.
The prominent CalTech geochemist Harrison Brown, who first got Harold Urey
interested in the study of meteorites, was among the very first grantees. There
were many differences of opinion among them about approaches to the ques-
tions posed by exobiology, but there was no shortage of talent.

When Simpson attacked. Wolf Vishniac immediately responded in a letter
to Science, as did Sidney Fox soon afterward. ^^ A few months later, in August
1964, microbiologist and sanitary engineer Gilbert Levin, an early exobiology
grantee, writing a "significance and status report" on exobiology, said: "The sig-
nificance of the term exobiology is in dispute and there are those who declare
that the subject has no status. . . . The subject is too important to permit such
'sea-lawyer' rationalization to impede its investigation. . . . The true significance
of exobiology is best revealed by the questions it can help answer."^"*

Levin went on to discuss the search for life on Mars, with NASA's first
Mars probe scheduled for launch in November, Project Ozma (a search for an
artificial extraterrestrial radio signal), and the search for life in the cosmos gen-
erally. He argued that the science of exobiology was still in its infancy, yet the
data from Project Ozma, from U.S. lunar probe Ranger 7, and from recent chemi-
cal studies of the Orgueil meteorite served as examples putting the lie to the
claim that the field had "no data."^^ On 23 May 1965 the well-known science
and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a piece about exobiology in
the New York Times Magazine called "A Science in Search of a Subject." Al-
though the title definitely played off of the publicity Simpson had drawn, the
article was highly sympathetic to exobiology, citing "big guns" Urey and
Lederberg but also the vocal young Carl Sagan as authorities who saw exobiol-
ogy as the most exciting scientific challenge of the generation.^^

First Projects: Academia and the Ames Research Center

How much money, exactly, was Simpson talking about? Before a Life Sci-
ences office existed, NASA had already funded at least two scientists whose
work was more or less directly relevant to exobiology. Microbiologist Wolf
Vishniac had received a grant to begin developing his Wolf Trap, as already men-
tioned. Gilbert Levin, the other respondent who rose to defend exobiology against
Simpson's challenge, had also received a small grant to begin developing a life
detection device he called "Gulliver," based on bacterial respiration of detect-
able radioactive CO2 from a radioactive i4C-labeled substrate in the nutrient
broth. Levin was a sanitary engineer who first developed the technique in the
mid-1950s as a means of detecting even minute amounts of sewage contami-
nation in water. In a conversation with NASA chief Keith Glennan over drinks
at a Christmas party in 1958, he was urged to apply for a NASA grant to de-
velop a version of the test which could be sent to Mars. Levin followed up and

32 The Living Universe

got support by late 1959.^^ A year later, from the new Office of Life Sciences,
he had been granted $141,173 for full-scale development of the Gulliver de-
vice for a Mars mission before the end of the decade; in 1963 he received an-
other $221,000 and in 1964 an additional $156,500.38

Other big recipients during the first granting period after the creation of
the Office of Life Sciences included CalTech geophysicist Harrison Brown, Ri-
chard Ehrlich of the Armour Research Foundation, Wilmot Castle Company (for
"research on sterilization of space probe components"), Lederberg's group at
Stanford (for "cytochemical studies of planetary microorganisms," i.e., devel-
oping the Multivator life detection laboratory), and Sidney Fox at Florida State
(for study of "chemical matrices of life") (see table 2.1).^' By the second semi-
annual period of grants under the Life Sciences office. Fox's group had become
the biggest exobiology grantees, receiving a hefty $784,000 for their work on
proteinoid microspheres, and Wolf Vishniac's grant was also renewed."*"

But the stable of talent was expanding as word got out that NASA was a
new pool of money for this kind of work. Other new grantees included Harold
Morowitz at Yale (see chap. 3), James Lovelock (to begin developing gas chro-
matographs that could be sent on lunar and Mars landing probes), and M. Scott
Blois of the Stanford Biophysics Lab."*' Charles R. Phillips of the army's Fort
Detrick chemical and biological warfare labs received a grant as well, for re-
search on sterilizing space probes and to "determine contaminants of spacecraft
components and materials."'*^ In 1962 University of Houston biochemist John
Oro and Berkeley biochemist and 1961 Nobel laureate Melvin Calvin both re-
ceived substantial grants.'*^

During this period Gerald Soffen, a young biologist trained at Princeton
under Harold Blum and now with NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL),
also persuaded Norman Horowitz of CalTech to be a consultant on Levin's
Gulliver project.'*'* The fact that Levin was a sanitary engineer without a doc-
torate, and not an academic scientist, was worrisome to NASA officials; they
feared the Gulliver experiment would not be taken seriously in the scientific
community without a Ph.D. -level scientist as part of the team.'*^ As Horowitz
put it: "I have agreed to serve as co-experimenter on Gil Levin's 'Gulliver' life-
detection project. It seems that the Gulliver has had no official standing up to
now, i.e., it was not even on the tentative list of experiments being considered
for Mariner B [renamed Voyager in 1963]. NASA wanted to have a professional
biologist attached to the experiment, in order to give it status with the scientific
community and with themselves. I have agreed to take this responsibility, since
I think the Gulliver is a well-designed device that deserves to be considered for
a Mars mission. I am sure that you agree with this, even though you may per-
sonally prefer the Multivator.'"**

The Multivator was a portable biochemical laboratory, capable of perform-
ing a battery of biochemical tests on a Martian soil sample. Along with his
Stanford associate Elliott Levinthal, Lederberg was developing it to fly on the
same mission as Levin's Gulliver and Vishniac's Wolf Trap.'*^ (The Mars life

Organizing Exobiology 33
Table 2. 1 Selected Early NASA Exobiology Grants, 1959-1964

Date

Investigator(s) Amount

Subject of Research

March 1959

October 1960-
June 1961

July-
December 1961

WolfVishniac $4,485

Harrison Brown $86,850

Joshua Lederberg $380,640

Samuel Silver $173,800

Gilbert Levin $141,173

Wilmot Castle Co. $ 1 06,879

Sidney Fox $103,804

Richard Ehrlich $27,766

Sidney Fox $784,000

Harold Morowitz $38, 1 96

James Lovelock $30, 1 00

M. Scott Blois $86,800

Charles Phillips $30,000

WolfVishniac $15,155

January-

Juan Oro

$71,250

June 1962

Norman Horowitz

July-

University of

$1,990,000

December 1962

California-Berkeley

(Samuel Silver)

Stanford

$535,000

University

(J. Lederberg)

Melvin Calvin

$252,500

January-
June 1963

Wilmot Castle Co. $ 1 05,297
(C. W. Bruch)

Gilbert Levin $87,556

GustafArrhenius $83,018

Harold Urey $73,054

Sidney Fox $550,000

Development of "Wolf Trap" life

detector
Problems of lunar and planetary

exploration
Development of Multivator

biochemical lab.
Biochemistry of terrestrial

microbes in simulated

planetary environments
Development of Gulliver life

detector
Sterilization of space probe

components
Study of proteinoid microspheres
Life in extraterrestrial

environments
Study of proteinoid microspheres

Study of Mycoplasma as

minimal cell
Develop gas chromatograph for

Surveyor
Molecular evolution in proto-

biological systems
Sterilization of spacecraft

components
Development of Wolf Trap
Organic cosmochemistry

Added as consultant on Gulliver,

18 May 1982
Construct space

sciences research building

Construct biomedical instrumentation
facilities

Reflection spectra as basis for

studying ET life
Sterilization of space probe

components
Development of Gulliver
Composition and structure of

meteorites
Meteorite inert gases and isotopic

abundances
Study of proteinoid microspheres,

hosting Wakulla Springs, Ra.,

conference

(continued)

34 The Living Universe

Table 2. 1 (continued)

Date

Investigator(s)

Amount

Subject of Research

Gilbert Levin

$221,000

Design and build prototype of
Gulliver device

James Lovelock

$55,000

Develop Surveyor lunar gas
chromatograph

Richard Ehrlich

$49,139

Survival of algae in simulated
Martian conditions

Carleton Moore

$28,978

Study and curation of meteorite
specimens

July-

H. Jones

$403,548

The chemistry of living

December 1963

systems

Joshua Lxderberg

$132,000

Multivator ("cytochemical studies
of planetary microorganisms")

Harold Urey

$78,974

Meteorite organic and inorganic
compounds

John Lilly

$36,475

Feasibility of communication
between man and other species
[dolphins]

January-

Joshua Lederberg,

$485,000

Cytochemical studies of planetary

June 1964

Elliot Levinthal,
Carl Djerassi

microorganisms

Peter Bulkeley

$62,984

Cytochemical studies of planetary

(on related grant)

microorganisms

WolfVishniac

$215,950

Microbiol, and chemical studies of
planetary soils

Ernest Pollard

$193,625

Physics of cell synthesis, growth,
division

H. H. Hess (NAS)

$172,675

Study of exobiology

Gilbert l^vin

$156,496

Continue development of Gulliver
device

Sidney Fox

$100,000

Study of proteinoid microspheres

Colin Pittendrigh

$66,318

Circadian rhythms on a biosatellite
and on Earth

Charles Phillips

$30,000

Stadies on sterilization

Ralph Slepecky

$19,458

Study of spore-forming bacteria

July-

Sidney Fox

$197,600

Study of proteinoid microspheres

December 1964

WolfVishniac

$138,441

Microbiological studies of planetary
soils

Harold Urey

$94,000

Study of meteorite organic
compounds

Klaus Biemann

$73,117

GCMS for detection of life-related
organics

J. R. Vallentyne

$46,880

Paleobiochemistry of amino acids
and polypeptides

Note: Information, including project titles, taken from NASA Semiannual Reports to Congress; dollar
amounts (in 1962-1964 dollars) are given from each six-month grant period.

Organizing Exobiology 35

detection projects will be discussed further in chap. 3.) In addition to his first
grant Lederberg soon received much more funding for Multivator and other, re-
lated work on exobiology projects, especially related to life detection on Mars.
In 1962 Lederberg received $535,000 to construct a new research facility for
biomedical instrumentation, in addition to research grants."*^

By fiscal year 1963 NASA's Life Sciences total expenditures had reached
$17.5 million, with an additional $3.5 million for medical science, fully half of
what the NSF spent on those areas during the same period. NASA had become
a significant player, along with the NSF, NIH, and the Atomic Energy Com-
mission (AEC), among others, in funding life sciences research."*' Grants in-
cluded capital expenditures for new research buildings; for example, a two
million-dollar building at the University of Califomia-Berkeley. The new build-
ing at Stanford expressly dedicated to exobiology was reported to be 35 per-
cent completed by January 1 965. ^"^ The big players drawing from this new pot
of money were Lederberg, Calvin, and Fox. Fox's group received large amounts
in 1963 and 1964; on the strength of his accumulated grants, Fox was able to
set up an entire freestanding research institute at the University of Miami in 1964,
with the university supplying only the buildings, teaching salaries, and admin-
istrative infrastructure.^' Vishniac was also continuously funded.^^j^ addition,
Urey, Sagan, Harrison Brown, and others in the inner circle were regular grant-
ees, and Princeton biologist Colin Pittendrigh joined this group. Pittendrigh be-
came involved through Lederberg in early planning efforts for life detection on
Mars.^^ His research on the effect of being in orbit on circadian rhythms was
funded by NASA in this period. Many smaller grants went out to the academic
research community during these years as well. Microbiologist Ralph Slepecky
at Syracuse University, for example, got support for studies on the survival of
bacterial spores.^^ Biologist Richard Young did related work, at NASA Ames
Research Center, on the survival of bacterial spores under simulated Martian
conditions. ^^ Carleton Moore at Arizona State University received a grant to
study meteorites.^6 One report said that "NASA grantees have made notewor-
thy progress in understanding how life can grow and exist in hostile and ex-
treme environments."^^ Even John Lilly, the researcher studying communication
with and among dolphins, got a grant for "a study of the feasibility and meth-
odology for establishing communication between man and other species. "^^ He
had first come in contact with NASA at an October-November 1961 meeting
on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), organized by the National
Academy of Sciences.

(jrants to the academic community, however, were only about half of
what l^SA spent on exobiology research. At the beginning, the Office of Life
Sciences intended for about half of the general research work and facilities con-
struction to be funded (much more than half, if one included the budgets for
actual development, launch, and operation of exobiology hardware on space mis-
sions such as Viking) to be in-house. By the early 1970s and throughout the

36 The Living Universe

subsequent history of the program, the split was closer to one-third for in-house
work and two-thirds to the university community.^'' Two NASA-affiliated fa-
cilities quickly developed large exobiology research groups: the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the Ames Research Center in Moffett
Field, California. (The JPL Exobiology program will be discussed further in chap.
4). Richard S. "Dick" Young was a young biologist who had worked at the
rocketry center in Huntsville, Alabama, in the late 1950s while completing his
Ph.D. degree at Florida State University in Tallahassee, so that he could put ex-
periments into nose cones and get them flown. In 1960 he came to work at the
new NASA Life Sciences office, and by late 1961 (after exobiology had been
moved from Life Sciences to Space Sciences under new administrator James
Webb's reorganization)^" he was sent to the Ames Research Center to begin
building up a life sciences lab and research group there, particularly specializ-
ing in exobiology.^'

By September 1962 Young had hired a biologist, Vance Oyama, and re-
cruited two young postdocs to come as the first nucleus of the research group,
Cyril Ponnamperuma and George Akoyunoglou, who had just completed doc-
toral degrees on chemical evolution studies under Melvin Calvin (see fig. 2.2).*^
The National Research Council collaborated with NASA to create several
postdocs per year in exobiology and other topics from 1962 onward; the
postdoctoral students worked at NASA Ames under one of the staff scientists
there (this became a major recruiting mechanism, to attract young scientists into
the field of exobiology).^^ Ponnamperuma later recalled:

When I got there . . . there were only two people in the Life Sciences:
Dick Young and Vance Oyama. My intention was to stay for one year
and then hopefully get back to Berkeley. But on the second day, Dick
Young said, "Why don't you stay and set up a lab for the study of the
origin of life?" And that's what we did immediately.

So my personal involvement there I would say was primarily be-
cause of Dick Young. And then our first laboratories were in rented quar-
ters, and then they put up this new building [1965]. As a matter of fact,
the name at the time was "Life Synthesis" Branch; I was the one who
changed it to chemical evolution. I was a bit horrified to find, when I
first got there, a secretary answering the telephone with "Life Synthe-
sis." Well, our goals were high at that time, you see.*"*

Why should NASA see chemical evolution as an obvious part of its brief? Ac-
cording to Ponnamperuma:

In the early days, there is no question about it, NASA felt that if it
wanted to search for life beyond the earth — you see, the search for ex-
traterrestrial life had been given to NASA as the prime goal of exo-
biology. That is more or less a direct quote from the National Academy

Organizing Exobiology 37

[of Sciences] document [of January 1963]. Part of that is tlie study of
the origin of life: if you are going to look for life somewhere else, you
want to establish the processes, the fact that life appears to be an inevi-
table result of evolution in the universe. You can't go and look for life
elsewhere unless you know it will originate somewhere. . . . The other
thing is that if you want to do something on the surface of Mars, you
need to know what kinds of things to look for.

So to NASA, it was always subservient to the search for life beyond
the earth. It was tied to the planetary missions. This is the trouble we
are having right now [1982]. Dick Young mentioned, I think, today that
tying exobiology to a NASA objective has become difficult. It was hung
on the Viking program; as long as we were looking for life on Mars,
exobiology was very safe. Now, they need to know where to stick it

The reconceptualizing of exobiology and NASA's relations with the field after
the 1976 Viking missions to Mars will be discussed at much greater length in
chapters.

In January 1964 NASA hired Harold P. "Chuck" Klein, a well-established
microbiologist and chair of the Brandeis University Biology Department, to come
to Ames and become its first formal head of the Exobiology Division there. By
year's end Klein had shown sufficient talent as an administrator (and had sur-
vived the transition from academia's freedoms to the account-for-every-paperclip
mind-set of government bureaucracy) that he became the chief of all Life Sci-
ences operafions at Ames, replacing the distinguished neurologist Webb
Haymaker.** Richard Young was then promoted to replace Klein as head of the
Ames Exobiology Division; Young remained in that post until 1967, when he
was promoted to Washington, D.C., to replace Freeman Quimby as NASA head-
quarters head of Exobiology, overseeing funding to the Ames group as well as
to the nationwide university exobiology community (fig. 2.3). At that time L. P.
"Pete" Zill replaced Young as head of Exobiology at Ames.

Klein's tenure at Ames encompassed the "boom days" of NASA, when
the Apollo program was in full swing and planetary missions began to multiply,
including Mariners to Mars and Venus, Pioneers and Voyagers to the outer plan-
ets, and Vikings to Mars. He oversaw the construction of a new laboratory build-
ing (completed in December 1965) and the training of many NRC postdoc
scientists; in addition, Klein presided over the division at a time when a great
many staff scientists were hired as civil servants. In the Exobiology (soon to be
called Planetary Biology) Division of Life Sciences alone, there were three bu-
reaucratic branches: Chemical Evolution, Biological Adaptation, and Life De-
tection Systems. Hires included microbiologist Ruth Mariner Mack, chemist Fritz
Woeller, chemist Katherine Pering, and, in 1966, geochemist Keith Kvenvolden.
(By July 1970, under Zill's supervision, the scientific staff of the Exobiology
Division had reached sixty [table 2.2]). Kvenvolden was hired by Ponnamperuma,

38 The Living Universe

Figure 2.3. Four successive chiefs of the NASA Exobiology Program. Left to right:
Richard S. Young, Donald DeVincenzi, John Rummel, and Michael Meyer. Photo
taken at the 1993 ISSOL meeting in Barcelona and captioned "The Dynasty."
(Courtesy D. DeVincenzi.)

head of the Chemical Evolution branch, to set up a lab specifically for the pur-
pose of doing high-purity, extremely clean analysis of lunar samples, which it
was anticipated would be arriving within three years or so from Apollo mis-
sions. As it turned out, this was also an ideal lab for analyzing the native organ-
ics from new meteorite infalls, since its high cleanliness standards made possible
for the first time reliable blanks, analyses with the absolute minimum possible
contamination from Earthly organic compounds. The timely fall of the Murchison
meteorite in Australia in September 1 969 gave the Ames clean lab the chance
to compare such an extraterrestrial sample with the moon rocks they were
analyzing.*^

One of Klein's NRC postdocs, a biochemist named Don DeVincenzi, was
hired on as a staff scientist / civil servant in October 1969, when his postdoc
was coming to an end. By 1971 DeVincenzi had been hired into an administra-
tive position at Ames. He spent a year, 1973-1974, at NASA headquarters in
Washington, D.C., as assistant to Richard Young. Keith Kvenvolden, meanwhile,
became chief of the Chemical Evolution branch of Ames Exobiology (upon the
departure of Ponnamperuma in 1971). He was appointed to replace Pete Zill as
head of the entire Exobiology (now called Planetary Biology) Division at Ames
in August 1974; whereupon DeVincenzi, just back from Washington, became
Kvenvolden's deputy.^^

Organizing Exobiology 39

Table 2.2 Personnel of NASA Ames Exobiology Division, July 1970

L. P. Zill, Chief

E. B. Cushman, Secretary

R. Johnson {Viking Project)

Walter O. Peterson

Chemical Evolution
Branch

Biological Adaptation
Branch

Life Detection
Systems Branch

C. Ponnamperuma, Chief

D. Avery, Secretary
K. Pering, Chemist
F. Woeller, Chemist
J. Flores, Chemist
J. Lawless, Chemist

J. Williams, Biology Lab

Technician
J. Mazzurco, Bio Lab Tech
M. Romiez, Chemist
K. Kvenvolden, Geochemist

E. Peterson, Chemist
S. Chang, Chemist

M. Chada, Chemist (assoc.)
W Saxinger, Microbiologist

(assoc.)
P. Banda, Biophysicist (assoc.
V. Schramm, Biochemist

(assoc.)
S. Morimoto, Chemist

(assoc.)
L. Replogle, Chemist

(assoc.)

M. Heinrich, Chief
D. Rittenberg, Secretary
N. Willetts, Chemist

C. Volkmann, Microbiologist
R. Rasmussen, Microbiologist
L. Jahnke, Microbiologist

L. Hochstein, Microbiologist

B. Dalton, Bacteriologist
H. Mack, Microbiologist
M. Stevenson, Microbiologist
H. Ginoza, Chemist
P. Deal, Plant Physiologist

D. DeVincenzi, Chemist
K. Souza, Microbiologist
L. Kostiw, Microbiologist
J. Lanyi, Microbiologist

V. Oyama, Chief
R. Woodworth, Secretary
B. Tyson, Chemist
G. Carle, Chemist

B. Berdahl, Chemist

0. Whitfield, Technologist

C. Johnson, Chemist

M. Lehwalt, Microbiologist
M. Silverman, Microbiologist
G. Pollock, Chemist
A. Miyamoto, Chemist
E. Merek, Plant Physiologist
J. Coleman, Bio Lab Tech
E. Munoz, Biologist
R Kirk, Chemist

) E. Bugna, Chemist
R. Mack, Zoologist

C. Tumbill, Electron Technician

R. MacElroy, Biochemist

N. Bell, Microbiologist

A. Mandel, Microbiologist

S. Kraeger, Microbiologist (assoc.)

Y. Asato, Genetics (assoc.)

R. Ballard, Microbiologist (assoc.)

M. Lieberman, Microbiologist (assoc.)

C. Boylan, Bacteriologist

(assoc.)

Source: Information provided here courtesy of Harold P. Klein.

Early Tensions: Fox and Proteinoids
versus the "Nucleic Acid Monopoly"

One of the early big beneficiaries of NASA exobiology patronage was pro-
tein cheinist Sidney Fox. He had been working on amino acid chemistry rel-
evant to the origin of life since 1953 or 1954. Fox ran a lab at Florida State
University from 1955 to 1964 with perhaps four or five graduate students at
any given time, several of whom might be working on origin of life-related

40 The Living Universe

problems.^' He was asked by NASA administrator Freeman Quimby to orga-
nize a second international conference on the origin of life in 1963, and Fox
eagerly assented. The conference, in Wakulla Springs, Florida, succeeded in at-
tracting many of the biggest names in the field, including Oparin, J. B. S.
Haldane, N. W. Pirie, J. D. Bemal, and others. Fox showcased his own work,
and even one of his senior doctoral students presented a paper; Richard Young
presented some work done in conjunction with Fox's lab.^" Fox quickly applied
for more money for his lab and was favored by NASA. Fox received enough
money to establish an Institute for Space Biosciences at Florida State. A year
later he persuaded the University of Miami to hire him and help him build an
entire freestanding research institute there, with as many as a dozen graduate
students and visiting postdocs as well. Fox's Institute of Molecular Evolution
thrived until his retirement in 1988, largely on NASA funds, though by the 1970s
Fox had also begun to fill in with money from some private donors. He cease-
lessly publicized his lab's efforts and solicited donations. During those two de-
cades a great many origin of life researchers were trained in Fox's lab, many of
whom have since become leaders in the field, such as Kaoru Harada, James
Lacey, and Alan Schwartz.

Considering his success as an institution builder, we would do well to step
back and look at Fox's research program for a moment. Fox was trained as a
protein chemist. He often liked to emphasize that famed geneticist T. H. Mor-
gan was on his dissertation committee and frequently told him, "Fox, all the
important problems of life are problems of proteins."^' Fox set out in the 1940s
to develop amino acid-sequencing techniques and made important contributions
but in the end was "scooped" by Fred Sanger's sequencing of insulin. By the
early 1950s Fox was experimenting with what products mixtures of amino acids
would react to form under hot, dry conditions. He found that they polymerized
to form a substance he called "proteinoid," which was not a straight chain
polypeptide like protein but did seem to form in a nonrandom way, given known
conditions and starting mixtures of amino acids. Proteinoids were also shown
to exhibit a range of enzymatic activities (though to a degree much less than
that of true protein enzymes), and Fox emphasized that the structures having
this property were created by spontaneous but nonrandom chemistry. After the
1953 Miller-Urey experiment. Fox described this process as a likely next step
on the road to complex biological molecules, in a lifeless chemical world where
amino acids had already formed.

By late 1958 Fox's group found that, when hot water was added to pro-
teinoid, it spontaneously produced tiny spheres of 1-5 |xm in diameter, about
the size of small bacteria. In a paper in Science in May 1959 Fox and his group
described proteinoid microspheres and suggested that they gave the first clear-cut
experimental answer to how one could get, by spontaneous chemical and physical
processes, from simple amino acids, formed Miller-Urey style, to membrane-
bounded structures with some critical "lifelike" properties, saying they had de-
veloped "a comprehensive theory of the spontaneous origin of life at moderately

Organizing Exobiology 41

elevated temperatures."^^ xhey showed that the microspheres absorbed biologi-
cal stains and showed differential permeability to some compounds so that their
inner content was soon different from that of the surrounding medium. As time
went on, Fox and his students further characterized the microspheres, observ-
ing that their membrane, while not lipid, did have a bilayer structure. The
microspheres spontaneously budded and sometimes divided, reproducing them-
selves and increasing in number. All these were lifelike properties, and Fox
claimed more and more forcefully that development through proteinoids repre-
sented the most likely model by which life had developed. He spoke of the
microspheres more and more as lifelike or even as alive in a rudimentary way,
declaring that his group had solved the origin of life problem, at least in prin-
ciple.^3 By the 1 970s Fox emphasized that a differential electrical charge was
maintained across the membrane of the microsphere. He referred to this char-
acteristic as the most rudimentary beginning of the electrical charge difference
across the membrane of neurons and said that in that sense the microspheres
also had "rudimentary consciousness."^''

From the beginning Urey and Miller were skeptical of the relevance of
proteinoids to the origin of life. They pointed out that amino acids formed in
their experiment only in aqueous solutions, whereas proteinoids required almost
total removal of water from the system in order to form. Then for microspheres
to form required adding water back into the system. Given the time frame in
which organic compounds might remain stable at high temperatures. Miller and
Urey considered such a sequence of hydration, dehydration, and rehydration a
geologically unlikely event. They pubhshed this criticism in Science in July
1959.''^ Fox responded in a letter to Science, saying that in a tidal area at the
sea edge with underground volcanism such repeated wetting and drying could
indeed be a common set of conditions.^*

Urey and Miller expanded their criticisms in a reply to Fox's letter, ac-
cusing Fox of linguistic sleight of hand in using terms such as proteinoid and
lifelike to try to smooth over big gaps and difficulties. They insisted that all liv-
ing things today are made out of proteins, which, they stressed, were very dif-
ferent chemically from Fox's proteinoids. They considered the somewhat
nonrandom composition with which proteinoids formed completely meaning-
less compared to the precision of the genetic code in determining amino acid
sequences in proteins.^^ Fox's conception also violated their epistemological
commitment to a random chemistry model of origins.^* Their tone was one of
barely concealed derision for what they considered slipshod, sloppy scientific
thinking. Miller's anger grew over the next few years as NASA Life Sciences
administrators found Fox's work not only interesting but also worthy of large-
scale funding. He and Norman Horowitz became more convinced than ever that
explaining the steps to the origin of DNA were crucial and that Fox was thus
avoiding perhaps the central issue in the question of how life originated. Both
had such disrespect for Fox that they boycotted the 1963 international confer-
ence he organized, even though the likes of Oparin and Haldane were present.^'

42 The Living Universe

Miller challenged the relevance of Fox's "thermal peptides" (he refused any
longer to even call them proteinoids) for the origin of life more forcefully than
ever in his 1973 text, cowritten with Leslie Orgel. Horowitz congratulated Miller
for taking a "firm stand on Fox ... I think Leslie sometimes tends to be more
tolerant of him than is necessary." Horowitz particularly liked Miller's state-
ment that, "except for holes or cracks in the cooling lava which might get hot
enough, a volcano is not a suitable place to conduct a thermal synthesis of
polypeptides. "^°

Here we see that NASA patronage may have had a significant effect in
giving Fox and his "proteinoid theory" a considerably longer lease on life than
they might have enjoyed in its absence. Fox's lab was responsible for some fur-
ther discoveries, though its claim that moon rocks returned by Apollo astronauts
contained amino acids turned out to be the result of earthly contamination.^'
Many of Fox's peers grew steadily more skeptical, however, about whether
proteinoids were indeed a separate phenomenon with little relevance to living
systems.

Fox responded with confident pronouncements that his group had solved
the origins problem and that most resistance to accepting that fact came from
deep intellectual prejudice, such as the belief that nucleic acids had primacy over
protein as master molecules. Fox called this a dogma and labeled the growing
body of researchers who believed it the "nucleic acid monopoly." He argued
that membrane-enclosed "protocells" probably came first and that the develop-
ment of complex heredity molecules such as nucleic acids came only much later.
Fox invoked historian of science Thomas Kuhn's conception of paradigm shift
to explain the intellectual change needed to accept that so simple a solution as
the proteinoid model could be correct.^^ And Fox never ceased predicting, up
until his death in August 1998, that the shift would soon come.^^

The deep conviction that had guided a research program, founded an in-
stitute, and trained a generation of workers was seen as unyielding bias and ego-
tism when it continued in the face of any and all criticism. A postdoc from Fox's
own lab wrote a devastating critique of the proteinoid theory in 1 979, which
was republished and widely read.^"* Fox's insistence that microspheres had con-
sciousness and his increasingly loose and playful use of metaphoric language
about their "mating," for example, were too much for even the most broad-
minded of his peers, and by the mid-1980s Fox had become highly marginalized,
considered to have made his worthwhile contributions long ago.**^ Whether this
could have occurred substantially earlier had Fox not benefited from early, large-
scale NASA patronage seems a question worth asking, since that assumption is
explicitly believed by many in the field.

Does this mean that in the zeal with which NASA threw money at its Cold
War mission in the early years the result was a lot of bad science? Certainly
not. Some might wish to interpret the story of Fox's proteinoid theory of life
that way (though Albert Lehninger, in his widely respected biochemistry text,
still cited Fox's "protein-first" view as an alternative to "nucleic acids first" in

Organizing Exobiology 43

1970 and again in 1975).^* One charge raised by his opponents, Fox's nucleic
acid monopoly, is that NASA administrators who were attracted to Fox's work
in the early 1960s were bureaucrats; had they been cutting-edge research scien-
tists, his opponents claim, Fox, despite being "an excellent self-promoter," would
never have received such large grants, and his funding would have been cut off
more quickly.^'' Quimby and, later, Richard Young and Donald DeVincenzi cer-
tainly continued to believe that Fox's work might be important longer than many
in the research community (and far longer than Miller or Horowitz).^^ The ten-
ability of this claim will be discussed later.

Exobiology Arrives

Early in 1967 Richard S. Young moved from NASA Ames, where he had
been head of the Ames Exobiology Division, to NASA headquarters in Wash-
ington, D.C., to replace Freeman Quimby as director of the Exobiology Pro-
gram at the national level. At this time NASA began to instigate a whole series
of meetings on origin of life and exobiology broadly (table 2.3). A series of five
meetings was planned in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and the
New York Academy of Sciences, beginning with meetings in May 1967 and May
1968 at Princeton. Only four of these meetings took place, but they had an im-
pact more for bringing together a wide range of scientists, along with NASA
funding, than for any other outcome. Cyril Ponnamperuma, among others,
claimed that these NASA-sponsored meetings were some of the most essential
glue holding together the nascent field of exobiology, until more formal struc-
tures such as a journal and professional organization (the International Society
for the Study of the Origin of Life [ISSOL]) came along: "Scientists need a
framework in which to work. So they [NASA] have helped that. The rails have
been pretty well greased all along. More than the initial catalytic effect, more
than giving the objective, the constant stimulus has been from [NASA]."^^

NASA sponsored meetings on more specialized topics as well. Between
1968 and 1971 radio astronomers discovered two dozen organic molecules, such
as formaldehyde, in giant molecular clouds in interstellar space, where they had
previously been unknown. In addition, in December 1970 extraterrestrial amino
acids and hydrocarbons were found by a NASA Ames team under Ponnamper-
uma, for the first time unequivocally, on a recent, uncontaminated sample of a
meteorite. By February 1971 a meeting was convened at Ames to assess the im-
plications of interstellar organic molecules for the origin of life.'o

In January 1970 and January 1971 NASA convened scientific meetings
in Houston to report and discuss findings coming in on the lunar samples brought
back by the Apollo 11 and 12 missions. In October 1971 the scienfists who spe-
cialized in carbon chemistry — that is, extraterrestrial organics — convened a meet-
ing of their own with NASA sponsorship, at the University of Maryland in
College Park. Cyril Ponnamperuma had just moved from Ames that fall to set
up a Laboratory of Chemical Evolution in the chemistry department, and he was

44 The Living Universe

Table 2.3 Selected Origin of Life / Exobiology Meetings through 2002

Meeting

Published Proceedings or Papers

1953, Society for Experimental Biology,

Cambridge
1955, Brooklyn Polytech

December 1956, New York Academy
of Sciences

August 1957, First International Conference,
Moscow

January 1960, First COSPAR meeting, Nice, Fr.

1961, Second COSPAR mtg., Florence

1961, Woodring Conference

April 1962, New York Academy of Sciences,
on organics in meteorites

May 1962, Third COSPAR meeting,

Washington, D.C.
June 1963, Fourth COSPAR meeting, Warsaw

October 1963, Second International Conference,
Wakulla Springs, Fla.

Spring 1964, Woodring follow-up meeting, Carnegie
Institute, Geophysics. Lab, Washington, D.C.

May 1964, Fifth COSPAR meeting, Florence

May 1965, Sixth COSPAR meeting.
Mar del Plata, Arg.

Summer 1965, Mars meetings

May 1966, Seventh COSPAR meeting

May 1967, Princeton Conference I
1967, Eighth COSPAR meeting

November 1967, Royal Society of London,
Aspects of Biochemistry of Possible
Significance for Origin of Life

May 1968, Princeton Conference II

April 1970, Third International Conference,
Pont-a-Moussan, Fr.

February 1971, NASA Ames, Interstellar
Organic Molecules and the Origin of Life

May 1970, Santa Ynez, Calif., Conference III,
planetary astronomy

May 1971, Elkridge, Md., Conference IV,
chemical evolution / radio astronomy

1954, New Biology special issue
(April)

1956, papers in American Scientist

1957, Annals of New York Academy
of Sciences special issue (August)

1959, Clark and Synge, eds.
Proceedings

1960, Bijl, ed. Space Research

1963, Life Sciences and Space
Research, vol. I

1964, Life Sciences and Space Research,
vol. 2, Florkin and Dollfus, eds.

1965, Fox, ed. Origins of Prebiological
Systems

1965, Florkin, ed.. Life Sciences and
Space Research, vol. 3

1966, Life Sciences and Space Research,
vol. 4, A. Brown and Florkin, eds.

1966, Pittendrigh, ed.. Biology and the
Exploration of Mars

1967, Life Sciences and Space Research,
vol.5

1970, Margulis, ed., Origins of Life

1968, Life Sciences and Space Research,
vol. 6

1968, Proceedings of the Royal Society
of London, vol. I71B, no. 1, Pirie, ed.

1971, Margulis, ed.. Origins of Life II

1971, Buvet and Ponnamperuma, eds..
Molecular Evolution I

1972, Margulis, ed.. Origins of Life 111

1973, Margulis, ed.. Origins of Life IV

Organizing Exobiology 45

Table 2.3 (continued)

Meeting

Published Proceedings or Papers

October 1971, College Park, Md., organics
in lunar samples

August 1972, Symposium on Cosmochemistry,
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory,
Cambridge, Mass.

2-3 April 1973, Roussel UCLAF conference
on "The Origin of Life," Paris

June 1973, Fourth International Conference/
P' ISSOL meeting, Barcelona

May 1 974, Royal Society of London,
Discussion on the Recognition of Ahen Life
August 1974, Conference at Bakh Institute,
Moscow

October 1974, College Park Colloquium 1
October 1975, College Park Colloquium 2

October 1976, College Park Colloquium 3

1977, Fifth International Conference /
Second ISSOL meeting, Kyoto

1978, Amino Acid Biogeochemistry,
Airlie House, Va.

October 1978, College Park Colloquium 4

June 1979, NASA Ames 1

May 1979- August 1980, UCLA PPRG

1980, Twenty-first COSPAR meeting

June 1980, Sixth International Conference /

Third ISSOL meeting, Jerusalem
October 1980, College Park Colloquium 5

June 1981, NATO Advanced Study Institute,
Maratea, It.

July 1981, January and May 1982,
ECHO Workshops

October 1981, College Park Colloquium 6

1982, First GRCOOL

July 1983, Seventh International Conference /
Fourth ISSOL meeting, Mainz, Ger.

1972, Space Life Sciences, vol. 3,
special issue

1973, A. G. W. Cameron, ed., Cosmo-
chemistry

1974, Oro, Miller, Ponnamperuma, and
Young, eds., Cosmochemical Evolution

and the Origin of Life

1975, Proceedings of the Royal Society,
ser. B 189, no. 2, Pirie, ed.

January and April 1976, Origins of Life,
special issues

1976, Ponnamperuma, ed.. Giant Planets
1976, Ponnamperuma, ed., Precambrian

Early Life
1978, Ponnamperuma, ed.. Comparative
Planetology

1980, Ponnamperuma and Margulis,
eds.. Limits of Life

1981, Billingham, ed.. Life in the
Universe

1983, Schopf, ed.. Earth's Earliest

Biosphere
1981, Life Sciences and Space

Research, vol. 19
1981, Y. Wolman, ed.. Origin of Life

1981, Ponnamperuma, ed.. Comets and
the Origin of Life

1983, Ponnamperuma, ed., Cosmo-
chemistry and the Origins of Life

1985, Milne, Raup, and Billingham,
eds.. Evolution of Complex and
Higher Organisms

1982 papers in OLEB

1984, Dose, Schwartz, and Thiemann,
eds.. Proceedings

(continued)

46 The Living Universe

Table 2.3 (continued)

Meeting

Published Proceedings or Papers

July 1983, Clay Minerals and Origin of Life,

Glasgow
1985, Second GRC OOL

July 1986, Fifth ISSOL meeting / Eighth
International Conference, Berkeley, Calif.

June 1987, lAU Colloquium on Bioastronomy,
Balaton, Hungary

1987, Third GRC OOL

1988, Prebiotic Syntheses, Okazaki Conference,
Japan

July 1989, Sixth ISSOL meeting, Prague, Czech.

July 1990, NASA Ames 4

August 1990, Fourth GRC OOL, Plymouth, N.H.

October 1991, NATO ASI, Edice, Sicily

October 1992, First Trieste Conference
on Chemical Evolution

1993, Fifth GRC OOL

July 1993, Seventh ISSOL meeting, Barcelona

April 1994, NASA Ames 5

August 1994, Sixth GRC OOL, Newport, R.I.

July 1996, Eighth ISSOL meeting, Orleans, Fr.

1996, Fifth International Conference
on Bioastronomy, Capri

1997, Seventh GRC OOL,
September 1997, Fifth Trieste Conference

on Chemical Evolution

1998, Amino Acid and Protein Geochemistry,
Washington, D.C.

February 1999, Eighth GRC OOL, Ventura,
Calif., Schopf and Lazcano, cochairs

July 1999, Ninth ISSOL meeting, San Diego, Calif

April 2000, First Biennial Astrobiology

Science Conference, Ames
July 2000, Tenth GRC OOL, Plymouth, N.H.

January 2002, Eleventh GRC OOL, Ventura,
Calif., Kenneth Nealson, NASA, chair

April 2002, Second Biennial Astrobiology
Science Conference, Ames

June-July 2002, Tenth ISSOL meeting,
Oaxaca, Mex.

1985, Cairns-Smith and Hartman, eds..
Clay Minerals and the Origin of Life

1987 papers in OL£B

1988, G. Marx, ed., Bioastronomy: The
Next Steps

1990 papers in OLEB

1993 Greenberg et al., eds.. Chemistry
of Life's Origins

1994 papers in OLEB

1997 papers in OLEB

1997 Cosmovici, Bowyer, and
Wertheimer, eds.. Proceedings

1998, Chela-Flores and Raulin, eds.,
Exobiology: Matter, Energy, and
Information . . . Universe

2000, papers in OLEB

2003, papers in International Journal of

Astrobiology, vol. 2
2003 papers in OLEB

Organizing Exobiology 47

instrumental in setting up the meeting. It was the first of what came to be a
whole series of what Ponnamperuma called "College Park Colloquia on Chemi-
cal Evolution." A third International Conference on the Origin of Life was con-
vened in April 1970 in Pont-a-Mousson, France, and a fourth in June 1973 in
Barcelona, Spain, partly with NASA funds. Independent of NASA, a "round-
table" conference on "origin of life" was held 2-3 April 1973 at Maison de la
Chimie in Paris, by Roussel UCLAF. In addition, the Bakh Institute of Biochem-
istry in Moscow sponsored an origin of Ufe / exobiology meeting in August 1974
to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Oparin's original 1924 pamphlet.

In his first few years as program chief, Richard Young was everywhere.
He turned up at almost every meeting and was always recruiting. Young ap-
proached scientists whose work he thought promising (or they approached him)
and suggested that they apply for Exobiology Program funding at a modest level;
"seed money" was what he had in mind. Thus, in 1971 Ponnamperuma recom-
mended Lynn Margulis's work on serial endosymbiosis theory to Young after
the NSF had turned her down, and he encouraged her to apply for a program
grant. At the April 1973 Paris meeting Young approached Carl Woese and sug-
gested that he apply. Young funded both of them immediately, though modestly,
and NASA has been a critical means of support for both (almost the sole means
for Margulis) ever since.

In particular. Young was looking for ideas so interdisciplinary in their
breadth that they were having difficulty getting funding from the NIH or NSF.
(The first person with origin of life or exobiology as a major research focus to
be elected to the National Academy of Sciences, not until 1973, was Stanley
Miller So the field was still perceived as an odd "borderland" area, not fitting
comfortably into biochemistry, geochemistry, microbiology, cell biology, or any
other existing disciplinary niche.) The large federal science-funding agencies
were organized to review proposals pretty much along disciplinary lines. Thus,
something far from central to cell biology, such as Margulis's 1970 proposal
for work related to endosymbiosis, was likely to be rejected by NSF's Cell Bi-
ology Division, often out of hand. As Jan Sapp has shown, by 1970 the study
of cytoplasmic inheritance (such as Margulis's study of DNA in mitochondria,
chloroplasts, kinetosomes, and other organelles) had been marginalized by the
rising power of nuclear (chromosomal) inheritance work, especially after Watson
and Crick's research on DNA structure and the consolidation of molecular biol-
ogy." Margulis recalls:

I applied for a three-year grant for $36,000, I remember distinctly, to
continue this work — we had been productive, we did publish a paper
or two on that [seeking DNA in kinetosomes] at that point. And that
was exactly when Origin of Eukaryotic Cells first edition, Yale Uni-
versity Press, came out. . . . My grant officer calls me up and he says
"I'm sorry to tell you we've turned down your proposal," it was a three
year proposal. And he went on to say, "you didn't suggest the following

48 The Living Universe

controls," he was telling me what was wrong, "you didn't have the fol-
lowing experiment." I said, "look on page seven, that's exactly the ex-
periment we have there so I don't understand." He said, "well, frankly
I haven't read the proposal but let me tell you that there are some very
important molecular biologists who think your work is shit." He said
that on the phone ... he said, "your work appeals to the small minds
in biology." And I said, "well who are the small minds in biology?"
And he said "well, natural historians." And I said "that's quite a compli-
ment." Anyway, he said "don't ever apply to [NSF] Cell Biology again."'^

Margulis was stymied and quite eager when Young encouraged her to apply to
NASA Exobiology. She recalls that, even with the American Institute of Bio-
logical Sciences (AIBS) review panels, the Exobiology grant application pro-
cess had a "small town" feel. Young had a fair amount of latitude, if he wanted
to encourage a particular investigator, at least with some modest initial fund-
ing. In 1971 Margulis received a grant of fifteen thousand dollars.'-' Both she
and Woese attest that this early seed money was critical to sustaining their re-
search programs, and it gradually increased year by year, as their research proved
more fruitful and fulfilled Young's hopes.''*

The search for and nurturing of interdisciplinary "diamonds in the rough"
which had been passed over by NSF and NIH soon became Dick Young's trade-
mark. And the tradition was very much handed down by apprenticeship to his
successors, DeVincenzi, Rummel, and Meyer (see fig. 2.3). People who first met
origin of life workers or first got connected with NASA through these meet-
ings, in addition to Margulis and Woese, include Jeff Bada (1967, 1971), Elso
Barghoorn (1967, 1971), David Buhl (1971), H. D. "Dick" Holland (1968), Sol
Kramer (1967, 1968), James Lovelock (1968), Leslie Orgel (1967, 1968, 1970,
1971), Carl Sagan (1963, 1967, 1968, 1971), J. W. Schopf (1967, 1970, 1971),
Alan Schwartz (1963), and many others. Barghoorn was a well-established ge-
ologist, but Schwartz and Bada were still graduate students when they first at-
tended these meetings, and Schopf had only just finished his Ph.D. work. Many
others were still quite young scientists (e.g., Margulis, Ponnamperuma, and
Sagan) or were unknown to the few who had dedicated their research primarily
to origin of life / exobiology. (Stanley Miller himself was still only thirty-seven
when he attended the NASA-sponsored meedng in Princeton in 1967.)

Barghoorn and his student Schopf specialized in identifying Precambrian
fossils of microorganisms in ancient rock samples (beginning with the two bil-
lion-year-old Gunflint chert from the northern shore of Lake Superior).'^ Their
involvement brought to the attention of origin of life researchers a reverse line
of work: the examination of steadily older and older fossil bacteria could work
backward toward the origin of the first life on Earth. That way the gap could
steadily be narrowed between what was known of later, complex life forms and
others much more similar to the original, most primitive living things. Further-
more, once one could narrow the time window in the Earth's geologic past, dur-

Organizing Exobiology 49

ing which life must first have appeared, one could also know much more about
the specific chemical and geological conditions under which the initial forma-
tive steps must have occurred. Precambrian paleontology, an uncommon spe-
cialty before the 1960s, proliferated and flourished under NASA support (more
on this in chap. 5).

Buhl was one of the astronomers who first detected organic molecules in
interstellar space, and NASA has continued to support the search for further de-
tails about how much and what kind of potential precursor molecules of life are
to be found in comets, meteorites, and other planets as well as in interstellar
space. Woese's work on the origins of the genetic code led directly to the dis-
covery of the Archaea, a third "domain" of life as different (in their ribosomal
nucleotide sequence) from bacteria and eukaryotes as those two are from each
other. Woese's work also led to highly sophisticated molecular methods for con-
structing lineages ("family trees") of all known living organisms, which give
highly suggestive hints about the nature of the last common ancestor of all forms
living today.

James Lovelock, initially hired by JPL as a consultant on life detection
strategies for the moon and planets, met Margulis, Holland, and Lars Gunnar
Sillen at the 1968 origin of life meeting.'* Thinking comparatively about the at-
mospheres of Mars, Earth, and Venus, he went on over the next few years, and
after 1970 in collaboration with Margulis, to develop the controversial Gaia hy-
pothesis. First published in a developed form in 1974, this amounted to the claim
that all living things on Earth, along with the lithosphere, oceans, and atmo-
sphere, act as a unified, synergistic system (which Lovelock named "Gaia," after
the ancient Greek Earth goddess) analogous to the body of a single organism,
which homeostatically controls environmental conditions in the oceans, the atmo-
sphere, and so on, so that they remain within the range needed to support life.

This sampling gives an idea of the broad range of interdisciplinary research
programs spawned, supported by, and/or spun off from NASA Exobiology
funding. As John Rummel, one of Young's successors put it, from the begin-
ning exobiology had no choice but to seek and encourage interdisciplinarity:

All the interesting questions [in exobiology] are interdisciplinary. Cer-
tainly all the leaders appreciated that and ... it was always important
to people who were in program management in exobiology that they
not be replaced by somebody who was narrowly focused. Because that
person would never be successful. And any attempt to narrowly influ-
ence the field in a particular discipline would have serious repercus-
sions in terms of the scientific quality of the results. So if I brought
anything to the program it was a desire to have good inconsistencies in
the people who were funded so that they could have a much better time
arguing with each other'''

As Rummel observed, mixing bright, talented people from such diverse fields
of inquiry was not without intellectual fireworks and personality clashes.

50 The Living Universe

On a higher level Richard Young's patronage of interdisciplinary work had
the potential to backfire in academia. The criticisms of Sidney Fox's research
mentioned earlier resonate with a documented history of tension between the
academic life science research community and NASA. Cutting-edge research-
ers in the academy criticized the work of NASA Life Sciences programs from
the inception through the entire first decade of their existence, and Young in-
herited this legacy when he came to head the Exobiology Program in 1967. The
chief criticisms were that NASA management priorities always put life sciences
research (unlike physical sciences and engineering) at the bottom, far below
engin-eering and technical support to launch missions and catch up in the space
race. NASA bureaucrats even split up life sciences research under several dif-
ferent offices in November 1961, less than two years after the Life Sciences
division had been created. Most of exobiology research was put under the Of-
fice of Space Sciences at that time, where it has remained for most of the years
since. Furthermore, academic scientists repeatedly criticized the design of ex-
periments funded by NASA, saying that improper or insufficient controls ren-
dered the results ambiguous. These charges were repeated in multiple reviews,
up through the early 1970s.'^On the other hand, every time NASA sought a
more qualified person from the life sciences research community to fill a mana-
gerial position, no highly qualified, cutting-edge academic showed any interest
in giving up the freedom of his or her lab for the managerial headaches of a
bureaucratic position (recall Klein's experiences in moving from Brandeis Uni-
versity to NASA Ames). Thus, the situation seemed unlikely to improve, even
when a new NAS report in August 1970 offered some more tactfully worded
versions of the long-standing criticisms.'^

This negative stance cannot be taken, however, to validate fully the claims
of Fox's opponents. Of the top Life Sciences officials involved in the early 1960s,
the three most involved in exobiology were all men who came from the research
community and were lauded for their competence, notwithstanding the fact that
none of them had been involved in origin of life or other exobiology-related
fields prior to coming to NASA. (This is not much of a substantial criticism at
a time when a small handful of scientists were just inventing "exobiology," and
by definition at first very few could claim any competence in that field.) Con-
sider their backgrounds: Richard Young, a Ph.D. embryologist who had flown
sea urchin eggs in missile nose cones to study the effect on development before
starting the first NASA Life Sciences laboratory at the Ames Research Center
in late 1961; Freeman Quimby, a Ph.D. physiologist who had been at the San
Francisco Office of Naval Research before coming to head the Washington, D.C.,
headquarters NASA Life Sciences office in February 1960; and Orr Reynolds,
also a physiologist, who had been head of research at the Office of Defense Re-
search and Engineering before taking charge of the biology division of the new
Office of Space Sciences (as Quimby's superior) in early 1962. All were estab-
lished researchers first, though Quimby and Reynolds had shown managerial
ability. Richard Young, as the first head of the Exobiology Program, came to be

Organizing Exobiology 51

more widely lauded on all sides of the exobiology research community for having
a good sense of sound science than almost any other figure in the history of the
field. Thus, a simplistic story that paints the managers of the early years of Life
Sciences as bureaucrats who did not understand the science cannot explain away
the appeal of NASA-funded research programs such as Fox's nor prove that they
were scientifically weak.

Nor can the small town atmosphere of the early days, with a portrait of
exobiology managers almost single-handedly picking and choosing what to fund,
serve as a simple scapegoat for any research retrospectively judged less valu-
able. Even under Freeman Quimby, by 1965 at the latest, a system of review
panels for exobiology grant applications had been put in place, administered
through the American Institute for Biological Sciences. '^'Carleton Moore, a
meteorite geologist who was a member of AIBS review panels from the begin-
ning, recalled making site visits to labs such as Fox's to evaluate the quality of
work being done."" It seems true that Quimby and Young exercised a fair amount
of discretion, as the Exobiology director had the right to take the review panel's
findings into account and then himself make the final decision about any given
proposal. Donald DeVincenzi, working as deputy under Young in NASA head-
quarters for a year, from 1973 to 1974, recalled: "After the review by a 15-mem-
ber panel from the American Institute of Biological Sciences, he would look at
them and add his own comments, and then funded them. It was that aspect of it
that I found interesting; that is that he did not have to blindly follow the peer
review results, strictly on the peer review scores. He was able to put his own
emphasis on it, he could for example, fund a proposal that had slightly lower
scores if he thought that that proposal was promising and worthwhile."'"^

Young had to provide written justification for overriding peer review
scores, but, as with DeVincenzi when he took over upon Young's departure in
August 1979, these cases were the exception rather than the rule, so that "it was
based on sound peer review panels, supplemented by [the director's] own evalu-
ations." Furthermore, during his tenure, says DeVincenzi: "I knew from the feed-
back of panel members when there was any problem. Whether a project was
their idea or my idea, we followed up on how it went. That was the way we got
people willing to be reviewers; it was a sort of hallmark of the [Space Sciences
and, within it. Exobiology] program that people talked with one another
freely."i03

Above and beyond evaluations of NASA and its methods for selecting
work to be funded, historian and philosopher of science Iris Fry has come to
similar conclusions to those described here about Fox's work itself. She also
notes that Fox's research program made some important philosophical contri-
butions as well as technical ones:

though major parts of Fox's theory were later challenged by many re-
searchers, his influence at the time was instrumental in turning the prob-
lem of the origin of life into a scientific subject. Though the relevance

52 The Living Universe

of his microspheres to the process of emergence is dismissed by many,
this is not the case as far as the proteinoids are concerned. . . . Various
scenarios, metaboUc as well as genetic, rely on the possibility of the
prebiotic formation of proteinlike polymers possessing enzymatic ac-
tivity as a crucial step in the origin of life [Stuart Kauffman's scenario
in his 1993 The Origins of Order, e.g.]. Fox's philosophical contribu-
tion to the subject is no less important than his empirical contribution.
Against the chance approach. Fox helped formulate the philosophical
anti-chance conception, pointing to the role of strong constraints chan-
neling the emergence of life and its evolution.'"^

Beyond intellectual matters at least some of the hostility from the academic sci-
ence community was due to what we might call "NASA envy." This is illus-
trated clearly in the case of the microbiologist Wolf Vishniac, the first scientist
to receive a NASA grant for exobiology research. Vishniac designed one of the
four experiments originally selected in 1969 to fly in the Viking biology pack-
age. Rising costs caused his experiment to be cut from Viking in March 1972,
rather suddenly depriving Vishniac's lab of its major source of external fund-
ing. He was asked to remain part of the Viking Biology Planning Team, but he
began to write rather exasperated apology notes for missing some meetings. He
was scrambling to re-tailor his research program on microbial life in extreme
environments, so that it would be mainstream enough to be funded by the NSF
and/or NIH. But Vishniac, like others in his position, found that he was being
punished by those agencies for accepting "space dollars." The NIH had turned
down a grant application; according to Vishniac, "I was told unofficially that it
received a low priority because I was 'NASAing' around.""'^ The NSF had also
decided not to renew a grant of his, "partly because of his association with
NASA. The exobiologist told [Viking team leader Gerald] Soffen that 'it is essen-
tial that I recapture some sort of standing in the academic world and I must there-
fore limit my participation in Viking to essentials only. '"'"^Clearly, to some
extent NASA officials internalized this attitude about their exobiology science,
at least in the early years: witness Soffen's felt need to include Horowitz, a Ph.D.
scientist and a "real biologist" on the Gulliver experiment, "in order to give it
status with the scientific community and with themselves [NASA]."'"^

Regarding the perception that exobiology was tossed around like a bu-
reaucratic football under the new NASA administrator James Webb, exobiol-
ogy scientists say this seriously misunderstands the actual situation within
NASA. DeVincenzi, Rummel, and most of the exobiology scientists are con-
vinced that exobiology is actually much more appropriately housed with Space
Sciences than lumped together arbitrarily with astronaut physiology and space
medicine, just because "those things are also biology." Exobiology work requires
the closest interdisciplinary interaction, they point out, with planetary astronomy
and geology, climatology and atmospheric physics and chemistry, oceanogra-

Organizing Exobiology 53

phy, and so forth, and thus belongs in a nonarbitrary, rational way, administra-
tively, with those sciences. Furthermore, much of the stigma of very poorly done
NASA science, with poor or no controls, they agree, did belong to the loose
field of astronaut medicine, which they were glad to part company with.'"^

Despite this hostile climate, exobiology had a sufficiently broad group of
scientists, the continued impetus of liberal NASA funding, and a secure enough
place in the public imagination that the field continued to grow. Soon, in addi-
tion to increasingly regular meetings with a stable (if expanding) core group,
some of the most clear-cut features materialized which mark a consolidating sci-
entific discipline: namely, a disciplinary journal and a professional society. The
journal that began publication in 1968 was called Space Life Sciences. Its subject
matter constituted all of what the NASA Life Sciences office had lumped together
at its creation: all topics exobiological — plus the effects of such things as space
flight and zero gravity — on living organisms and metabolic processes. This was
much to the distaste of Lederberg, Cyril Ponnamperuma, and other "pure" exo-
biologists, but, as in the Office of Life Sciences, it was an artifact of the seren-
dipitous events that had led to the journal's founding.

A highly enterprising and wealthy Armenian immigrant to the United
States, Gregg Mamikunian, became a naturalized citizen and was involved in
the chemical evolution programs at JPL in the early 1960s. He was interested,
for instance, in the analysis of meteorites for traces of life or its precursor
molecules."^' According to Ponnamperuma:

One day he got the idea that space life sciences needed a journal. So
he telephoned Reidel; Pergamon was producing [a joumal] in some other
discipline, so he called Reidel up, and Reidel said they would be de-
lighted. And that's how the joumal began. It went through a bad his-
tory at the beginning. Mamikunian held up the manuscripts and people
started complaining. Then a man named Lovelace . . . who was an M.D.,
took it over and it was still primarily space life sciences. He asked me
at the time whether I would be an associate editor, and I agreed to do
that, just to look over the origins of life / chemical evolution articles. "••

After only a year or two Lovelace wanted to give up the joumal, being too busy
with other pursuits, so he suggested to Reidel that Ponnamperuma become full-
time editor. Ponnamperuma had little interest in zero-gravity work; in late 1972
he agreed to it, but only on the condition that the joumal be devoted solely to
chemical evolution and exobiology. Reidel agreed, so, beginning with volume
5 in 1974, the journal's name was changed to Origins of Life: An International
Journal Devoted to the Scientific Study of the Origin of Life J^' Ponnampemma
overhauled the editorial board accordingly, staffing it with exobiology regulars
such as Barghoorn, Klein, Lederberg, Oro, Sagan, and Young. In 1983 the
editorship passed to chemist James Ferris at Rennselaer Polytech. A new

54 The Living Universe

publisher, Kluwer, took over soon after, and the name was changed to Origins
of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere to indicate the extent to which studies of
the early history of life on Earth, early ecosystems, and so forth, were now
included under the exobiology umbrella. This trend continued with the creation
of the Astrobiology Institute in 1997. Alan Schwartz at Nijmegen University in
the Netherlands assumed editorship of the journal.

No doubt part of what gave Ponnamperuma the confidence to insist that
the journal be devoted exclusively to exobiology was the sense that the field
had grown and matured sufficiently that it needed (and could more than fill the
pages of) a journal entirely its own. In 1971 another journal had begun publica-
tion, the Journal of Molecular Evolution, which included origin of life research
as one of its major areas of coverage. But two signal events in 1972 contrib-
uted to this sense as well. First, early in the year Oparin, Fox, Oro, Young, Marcel
Florkin, and others had founded the International Society for the Study of the
Origin of Life and began planning its first meeting, which was to be the Fourth
International Conference on Origin of Life, in Barcelona in 1973. "^ Subse-
quently, ISSOL meetings were planned with considerable regularity in every third
year (see table 2.3). The society and its regular meetings on an international
scale showed that the field had achieved stability. Norman Horowitz cited the
new journals and the society as evidence that the field had become a consoli-
dated research area in a prominent 1974 review article. He added that, even con-
sidering only the literature since 1970 or so, "a large number of review articles,
critical and theoretical discussions, books, and conference proceedings dealing
with the origin of life have appeared in recent years.""^

Shortly before, in the summer of 1972, Horowitz formed a committee to
nominate Stanley Miller for membership in the National Academy of Sciences,
the most prestigious scientific body in the United States. Horowitz realized that
the stringent nominating process, historically centered mostly on existing, well-
established disciplines such as the Biochemistry Section of NAS, was a barrier
to a scientist in a new borderland area such as exobiology. Thinking Miller highly
deserving, he felt that nominating him for membership would simultaneously
serve as a "good test case" for other top-notch workers in the new field (though
he had strong ideas about who they were and, even more clearly, who they were
not)."'' Miller, it should be noted, had received most of his funding from NSF
and other non-NASA sources up to this time, making him immune to the kind
of NASA envy which was so destructive for Wolf Vishniac at just this time."^
One of those who signed the nominating petition, the biochemist John Edsall
of Harvard, agreed, saying Miller's work "is certainly outstanding and he makes
an excellent candidate for a nomination of this sort [requiring a Voluntary Nomi-
nating Group], since his field of research does not fit neatly into any of the
regular categories." In a letter trying to assuage possible opposition by the Bio-
chemistry Section, Horowitz added: "As you know, Stanley inhabits a sparsely
populated interdisciplinary area between biochemistry and geochemistry and has

Organizing Exobiology 55

contributed to both.""^ Miller was successfully voted into the National Acad-
emy in early 1973. If it was a test case, then exobiology had passed the test and
gained a de facto foothold among the highest ranks of the nation's scientists.
George Gaylord Simpson, now retired near Tucson, Arizona, might still persist
in his opinion."^ But "this view of life" had been rendered moot by the passage
of events; exobiology had arrived.

Chapter 3

Exobiology^ Planetary
Protections and the Origins ofj^e

^n the first fifteen years of the NASA exo-
biology program the largest expenditures by far were mission oriented: devel-
oping experiments to travel on space probes, especially to Mars, and constructing
"clean lab" facilities to analyze meteorites or returned samples from the Moon
for organics that might be relevant to the origin of life. NASA funding pushed
origin of life research in new directions, including the study of life in extreme
environments and the development of the field of theoretical biology. At the same
time NASA expanded work under existing approaches. Cyril Ponnamperuma
and the chemical evolution team he assembled at NASA Ames carried out many
new variations on Miller-Urey synthesis experiments, as did other labs.' A great
deal of energy and brainpower also went into debating the best policies and pro-
cedures to protect against microbial contamination from one world to another,
which could vitiate all attempts to measure native organic compounds, let alone
determine the possible existence of any biota native to the Moon or planets. Both
forward contamination (Earth organisms carried to another world on an insuffi-
ciently sterilized spacecraft) and back contamination (return of alien life to Earth
with retuming astronauts and/or samples) were considered. While most researchers
considered back contamination from the Moon an extremely unlikely possibil-
ity, it was still thought that the consequences could be so severe that a quaran-
tine effort was justified, both on samples and astronauts. More challenging was
the development of analytic labs so free of any earthly organics that results from
extraterrestrial samples could be reliably attributed to the sample itself. From
many different directions, through an astonishing variety of often seemingly un-
related activities, NASA was gradually building the new discipline of exobiology.

The Mars Program, through June 1965

Although early talk about life on other planets had focused on Venus as
well as Mars, by 1962 space probes and ground-based astronomers had shown
the surface of Venus to be as astronomer Carl Sagan had predicted: a runaway

Exobiology, Planetary Protection, Origins of Life 57

greenhouse at a temperature of hundreds of degrees, far too hot for any life to
survive. Thus, while concern about forward contamination still applied to all
other moons and planets, the attention of those eagerly seeking life on other
worlds focused almost exclusively on Mars. There is one sense in which exo-
biologists were thereby vindicating G. G. Simpson's critique of their zealous
crusade. In theory exobiology could benefit as much or more from the com-
parative study of other planets where life did not appear; the comparison would
highlight the factors necessary for the origin of life most strikingly by their ab-
sence. (Lovelock's comparison of Venus, Earth, and Mars was precisely this kind
of broad-based approach [see chap. 4].) A truly systematic exobiology would
therefore have focused equal amounts of resources on as many different solar
system bodies as could be practicably reached by the available technology. Nev-
ertheless, resources shifted quickly and overwhelmingly toward Mars explora-
tion. This was a big risk: if the search for life on Mars turned out to be a bust,
the scientific reputation of exobiology would suffer, and Congress's willingness
to continue pouring in millions of dollars would be the first victim.-^

During the early 1960s, however, the free flow of money from Congress
to NASA and from NASA to the research community made such worries seem
excessively fussy: there would be enough money to do everything in the end, it
seemed. A report in the 24 August 1962 issue of Science on a "Soviet Space
Feat" of the previous week very much captured this attitude: the feat would not
result in more funds for NASA, the author opined, because the tap was already
open full bore. "Thus, the Soviet feat is not likely to result in more funds for
NASA, since under Kennedy NASA has been told to think big and has received
everything it has requested."-^

As described in chapter 2, among the very first exobiology grantees were
Wolf Vishniac, Gilbert Levin, and Joshua Lederberg, who were developing life
detection devices to be sent to Mars. Vishniac's Wolf Trap was based on using
the light-scattering property of multiplying microbial cells in a nutrient solu-
tion. It would mechanically introduce soil from another world into a nutrient
broth, incubate the mixture, and look over time for the typical light-scattering
reaction as the broth became cloudy with growth. Levin's Gulliver (see fig. 4.2)
incubated soil in a nutrient broth that included carbon sources (formate, lactate,
and glutamate) radioactively labeled with 14C then measured the gas over the
solution over time with a Geiger counter, seeking to detect |4C-labeled CO2 given
off by any microbes as they oxidized the carbon sources.'*

Lederberg's Multivator was a more ambitious device, with a rotating cham-
ber containing fifteen separate chemical test chambers, so that many different
biochemical analyses could be carried out on a soil sample, all directed from
an Earth-based lab. Dust-bearing air was drawn into the device and "combined
with appropriate reagents or biological materials. The resulting reactions are then
detected with a photomultiplier ... for detection of biologically important mac-
romolecules by fluorimetry, turbidimetry, nephelometry, absorption spectroscopy,
or absorption spectral shifting in a test substrate."^ The primary biochemical

58 The Living Universe

assay with which the device was first being tested was for the enzyme phos-
phatase. (Such a large automated lab made sense in the context of the large Mars
lander mission called Mariner B and later Voyager, as it was envisioned between
1960 and late 1965. As costs escalated for such a large spacecraft, the mission
was scaled back considerably, so the experiments had to be sent designed to
operate in a largely preprogrammed sequence, with very little of the flexibility
designed into a device such as Multivator. It was essentially discontinued at that
time.)

In June 1964 the Space Sciences Board of the National Academy of Sci-
ences (NAS SSB) sponsored a series of meetings, through the summer of 1965,
to plan Mars exploration strategy, especially with biology in mind. A Mars launch
window was coming up in November 1 964; both the United States and the So-
viets launched Mars probes at that time for July 1965 encounters with Mars. As
it turned out, only the U.S. Mariner 4 was still operational when it flew by Mars.
But the Cold War competition atmosphere still very much surrounded delibera-
tions. Lederberg, Vishniac, Princeton biologist Colin Pittendrigh, and NAS ad-
ministrator J. P. T. Pearman (who had been a supporter of the 1961 Green Bank
SETI meeting) were prominent forces at the meetings. The proceedings were
published in early 1966 as the volume Biology and the Exploration of Mars. ^
According to a journalist's account (brushing quickly past the qualifiers), life
on Mars was judged by these panels to be "so likely, in fact, that a group of
eminent astronomers, physicists, biologists and chemists . . . urged [NASA] to
underwrite an elaborate Martian research program that will find out for sure."^
Norman Horowitz tended to be a devil's advocate in these discussions; it is not
surprising, however, that a reporter would pick up on the underlying enthusi-
asm of the Lederbergs and Sagans and minimize the reservations of the "stodgy."

Horowitz felt he was only maintaining the skeptical attitude proper to a
scientist; he was extremely wary of the emotional factor in science, having been
burned by it early on, when he was one of the first advocates of the controver-
sial one-gene, one-enzyme hypothesis in the early 1940s.^ In an interesting ex-
change that sheds light on both men, Lederberg wrote to Horowitz in January
1963: "I don't know whether I've had any chance to say this out loud. ... In
recent years I have had a chance to reflect back on the noise I used to make
about the one-gene, one-enzyme theory, and I now see that I was not only fac-
tually wrong in opposing it, even as an intellectual exercise, but showed rather
poor judgment in failing to defend it. Perhaps I was reacting to the idea (that
no one else ever had) that it was the ultimate Truth; what in science ever is!"'
Horowitz responded: "I am happy to have your note in re: one-gene, one-enzyme.
You did use to give me a hard time in those discussions. I used to go home
from those meetings wondering whether I was the victim of some monstrous
self-delusion — the case seemed so clear to me and yet so murky to others whose
opinions I respected. I sensed, of course, that an emotional factor was involved
also, but I could never quite make out the basis for it. I am glad to have your
comment on that, too."'" Horowitz, himself a victim of prejudice, was thus sen-

Exobiology, Planetary Protection, Origins of Life 59

sitized early in his career to the "emotional element" behind science. But, ironi-
cally, he was to become the "power that be" with his own philosophical invest-
ment in no life on Mars. One cannot fault his basic skeptical attitude, only proper
in science. But the way it manifested in specific cases was such that Fox or Sagan
must have felt very much like the young Horowitz when faced, during the early-
to mid-1970s, with the mature Horowitz.

A quite similar series of developments occurred in the SSB's deliberations
about interplanetary contamination. From the early meetings of the WESTEX
subcommittee in 1959-1960, Lederberg and Sagan argued for high priority for
anti-contamination efforts for outgoing U.S. planetary probes. They argued
almost as forcefully for efforts to prevent back contamination from sample re-
turn missions when those began, presumably first with lunar samples returned
by Apollo and/or by the Russians. They wanted the NAS SSB's official posi-
tion represented as such to the international Committee on Space Research
(COSPAR), which began in 1958 and quickly became a forum for exobiology
discussions. When COSPAR formed an anti-contamination panel at its 1963
Warsaw meeting, it was at their urging, and the Americans who became involved
were Allan H. Brown, Wolf Vishniac, Colin Pittendrigh, Lawrence Hall, and Carl
Sagan." NASA Exobiology began its own Planetary Quarantine Program in the
second half of 1963.'^ Allan Brown was also on the NASA Biosciences sub-
committee and was a strong advocate of taking back contamination seriously.
He still argued thus at the 1964-1965 Mars meetings, claiming that, even if the
risk was very small, the scale of harm could be very great, so all prudent pre-
cautions had to be taken. '^

As early as February 1960, however, Horowitz found himself again the
dissenting voice, especially on back contamination. He thought some concern
for sterilization might be warranted, though as time went by during the plan-
ning of the Viking mission he came to believe it was superfluous for Mars, as
he thought conditions there so harsh that no imported Earth microbes would sur-
vive. But from the beginning he considered worry about back contamination to
be losing all sense of perspective on space exploration, getting priorities out of
order. In a memo to Lederberg dated 6 February 1960, Horowitz argued that:

Against the slight risk of pandemic disease and the perhaps greater one
of economic nuisance, one must weigh the potential benefits to man-
kind of unhampered traffic with the planets. The present situation may
be likened to that which obtained in Europe in the decades before Co-
lumbus set forth on his voyage of discovery. If men had known then
that Columbus would bring back with him a disease — syphilis — that was
to plague Europe for centuries, they might well have prevented him from
ever leaving Spain. Suppose, however, that they had known also of the
tremendous benefits that were to flow from the discovery of the New
World. Can there be any doubt what their decision would have been
then?

60 The Living Universe

In view of the small risk involved in the premature return of plan-
etary probes, it would be inadvisable to adopt a position — e.g., an em-
bargo on returning spacecraft — which might prejudice the development
of the necessary technology for return flights. Also to be considered is
the probably deleterious effect on public opinion of an excessively cau-
tious policy. (By this I mean that the public may be frightened out of
any interest in space exploration.) . . . The procurement of . . . samples
should therefore be the primary goal of exobiological research. It should
be understood that the biological exploration of the planets by instru-
mented robot payloads is not a substitute for this primary objective, but
is only a step toward it. This and all other aspects of the exobiological
research program should be subordinate to the attainment of the pri-
mary goal.''*

Horowitz asked Lederberg to present his views at the upcoming WESTEX meet-
ing of 29 February, which he would not be able to attend. Lederberg said he
would certainly do his best, though he could not argue for such views as elo-
quently as Horowitz himself could; he urged Horowitz to reconsider attending
to present them in person. Further:

I think I do agree that the acquisition of planetary samples is, and should
be stated to be, a primary goal of planetary exploration. ... On the other
hand, I also feel that we should go just as far as we can with instru-
mental analysis partly to see what insights this will give on the kinds
of hazards discussed. I think that when the preliminary experiments . . .
have been done, we will then be in a much better position to decide
which, if any, precautionary measures are still justified.

I think your remarks about Columbian exploration and the return of
syphilis to the Old World are quite apropos. But I think we are in a better
position than Columbus was to have our cake and eat it too. I think it
is unfair to suggest that the choice is between syphilis and America when
a little caution and patience could give us the best of both worlds.

I don't believe it would be possible, without a well financed public
relations campaign, to frighten the public out of space exploration. Judg-
ing by the way things have been going, a rash blunder motivated by no
policy at all is a more likely danger.'^

Lederberg circulated Horowitz's memo to the rest of the WESTEX committee,
suggesting it be a topic for discussion at the upcoming meeting, with or with-
out Horowitz present. If Lederberg's reply seems like polite disagreement, not
all WESTEX members reacted so cordially. Aaron Novick of the University of
Oregon was angry: Horowitz's memo and attitude "demand comment," he wrote
in a memo of his own to the committee.

In the case of the problem of contaminating other planets with Earth
life, most people apparently believe that this is largely a scientific prob-

Exobiology, Planetary Protection, Origins of Life 61

lem. Contaminating a planet would be a scientific catastrophe and would
otherwise not affect mankind. Back contamination as we agree poses a
threat to everyone. Admittedly the probability of back contamination
is very small indeed, but quite possibly the product of this small prob-
ability times the measure of all possible catastrophes is finite. . . .

The analogy to Columbus, like most analogies, only creates confu-
sion. Perhaps I enlarge upon this confusion, but it is not inconceivable —
witness the myxoma virus in the rabbit population in Australia — that
syphilis might have erased pretty much all of the population of Europe.
Had this occurred, it would be agreed that restraint of Columbus would
have been a good idea. . . . Alternatively, it might have been worth-
while to wait until Fleming's discovery of penicillin.'*

Evidently, the subject remained a disputed one at WESTEX. Although Horowitz
seems to have withdrawn and placed his energies into other areas, he does not
seem to have changed his opinion much.'^

One of the lasting outcomes of the contamination debate was the creation of
a U.S. government administrative position called the "planetary protection of-
ficer" (PPO), charged with oversight of planning to avoid any contribution from
the U.S. space program to such problems. This development occurred during
Dick Young's tenure as NASA headquarters Exobiology chief; Young became
the first planetary protection officer. This dual set of duties continued to be com-
bined in the same position with Young's successors, Don DeVincenzi and John
Rummel. But Michael Meyer was planetary protection officer for only the first
few months after he took over. By early 1993 the two jobs were separated, and
the PPO job was advertised. John Rummel was rehired as PPO on 1 November
1997, as a non-civil service contractor; he continues in that role as of this writ-
ing (December 2003).'^

Morowitz, the Minimal Cell Approach, and Theoretical Biology

In the spring of 1960 Ernest Pollard, head of the eclectic Biophysics Pro-
gram at Yale, was showing Melvin Calvin around the department, looking in
on the labs and the research currently going on there. One of the labs was run
by Harold Morowitz, who, like Carl Woese, had earned his Ph.D. degree in bio-
physics at Yale; Morowitz had returned in 1955 as an assistant professor in the
program. He was working on Mycoplasma, the simplest prokaryotic cells, then
known as pleuropneumonia-like organisms (PPLOs). Morowitz had an interest
in understanding what was the minimal complement of things needed for a fully
functional living cell and was studying Mycoplasma as the case closest to that
minimal border.'^ When Morowitz showed Calvin his work, the Berkeley
biochemist's reaction was: "You know, NASA would be interested in that. You
should apply to Freeman Quimby for exobiology funds." Morowitz did, and

62 The Living Universe

within a year he had received his first NASA grant, for $38,196. He was steadily
supported by NASA Exobiology money from that time until 1992.^"

In light of his broad humanities interests and how involved with NASA
Morowitz was, his absence from the 1967 and 1968 Princeton origin of life meet-
ings (where the focus was exceptionally broad) seems odd. Morowitz explains:
"I haven't been part of the origin of life Establishment. I'm not a joiner" Dur-
ing the process of looking, with his wife, for unusually stimulating schools for
their five children, Morowitz was asked to review a National Science Founda-
tion (NSF) grant application by Clair Folsome to set up a mycoplasma research
program at the University of Hawaii-Honolulu.^' He then applied to spend his
sabbatical year (1967) with Folsome's group; working on the minimal cell line
of reasoning, they addressed the properties a minimal cell membrane must have
for life. 22 In addition, Morowitz wrote most of Energy Flow in Biology at that
time, a book that quickly became a classic in the origin of life community for
its thorough thermodynamic treatment of the problem.^^ Having fallen in love
with Hawaii, the family spent two more sabbatical years in Maui, where
Morowitz wrote Life on the Planet Earth (1975) and another book.^"*

Morowitz's research on the minimal cell approach has been remarkably
productive for four decades. As Carl Woese wrote to him in 1977: "You epito-
mize that rigorous Yale biophysics approach; I was influenced by it, but have
never mastered it. When I see how most biologists are trained today, I appreci-
ate even more how important our training was; and you are perpetuating it."^^
By November 1976 Joshua Lederberg was taking cues from the mycoplasma
approach. Writing to Dick Young for NASA funding, he proposed a new initia-
tive to "look for eobionts," that is, to characterize the earliest living forms.
Lederberg suggested that the most fruitful approach would be to start from my-
coplasmas and work backward.^*

Although Morowitz was also interested in halobacteria and in bacterial
photosynthesis, 2' it is his work in mycoplasma studies which has paid off the
most. Indeed, Morowitz's work has made Mycoplasma such a well-known bench-
mark for studies of the minimal cell that the Mycoplasma genome was among
the early ones to be sequenced fully. Now, in addition to the catalog of basic
metabolic processes and building blocks Morowitz cataloged, it is known that
a suite of about 470 genes are needed for this simplest prokaryotic cell. A re-
markably precise "recipe" can be spelled out at this point for a cell close to the
hypothetical "minimal cell." Although this work does not directly address what
steps must have come before to assemble this recipe, it nonetheless represents
a clear benchmark of progress in the overall state of the origin of life problem.

By the late 1970s, however, Morowitz suspected mycoplasmas were prob-
ably not the first cells. His colleague Clair Folsome, of the Exobiology Labora-
tory of the University of Hawaii, described the "Onsager-Morowitz" definition
of life as follows: "Life is that property of matter that results in the coupled
cycling of bioelements in aqueous solution, ultimately driven by radiant energy
to attain maximum complexity. "^^ Morowitz's approach has recently been de-

Exobiology, Planetary Protection, Origins of Life 63

scribed as being "from the perspective of complex systems dynamics," a label
also used for the work of Stuart Kauffman and others affiliated with the Santa
Fe Institute, where Morowitz has been on the board of directors for over a de-
cade.^' His study of the metabolic pathways common to all organisms led him
to believe the earliest cell was probably a photosynthetic autotroph, in contrast
to the reasoning of Oparin, Haldane, and VanNiel. By 1988 he, Bettina Heinz,
and David Deamer had developed the theory and experimentally modeled the
formation of simplest protocells — that is, spontaneously forming vesicles, self-
enclosed by a bilayer of amphiphilic lipid molecules. They described how such
a system could function to capture energy and nutrients. Revealing the recent
influence of Peter Mitchell's chemiosmotic theory, they concluded: "if some of
the amphiphiles are primitive pigment molecules asymmetrically oriented in the
bilayer, light energy can be captured in the form of electrochemical ion gradi-
ents . . . thereby providing an initial photosynthetic growth process."^" In con-
trast to "gene-first" scenarios, they argued, as Morowitz had since at least 1981,-"
that a membrane-enclosed structure or vesicle was a far more likely first step.
(Hence the title of one of his many, highly readable popular science books. May-
onnaise and the Origin of Life. )^^ Such a lipid vesicle provided the basic sepa-
ration of a compartment in which important biomolecules could be concentrated,
and, in line with the understanding Mitchell had provided, it allowed for an
energy-generating mechanism by the creation of ion gradients (e.g., proton gra-
dients) across the membrane. Only in such an enclosed, energized space was it
possible to imagine conditions in which large biopolymers, such as polynucle-
otides, could be synthesized and protected from chemical degradation. Moro-
witz's 1992 book The Beginnings of Cellular Life develops the story further; it
is an elegant, clear exercise in the logic of what the most basic constituents of
the last common ancestor surely had to include.^^ Morowitz teases out the strands
of the metabolic pathways shared by all extant organisms and argues persua-
sively that this amounts to a portrait of the last common ancestor's metabolic
capabilities.^*

o/\(ASA support for Harold Morowitz's work has produced much more,
however, than the Mycoplasma story and the list of requirements for a minimal
cell, impressive as they are. By 1962 Morowitz, Pollard, and George Jacobs of
NASA had formed what they called the Committee for Theoretical Biology. They
had met at the NAS Space Science Board's study group in Iowa City in the sum-
mer of 1962 and, together with several other colleagues, had agreed that sup-
port was needed for the development of theoretical biology as a viable and
vibrant discipline. Through Morowitz and Jacobs's efforts NASA Exobiology
funding was obtained to support several month-long summer courses in the sub-
ject. "It was a real shot in the arm for theoretical biology. Theoretical biology
was not well regarded in those days," according to Morowitz. ^^ The group first
convened to plan strategy on 30 October 1962 at the Nassau Inn in Princeton,
New Jersey. Present at the meeting were Pollard, Morowitz, and Jacobs but, in

64 The Living Universe

addition, James Danielli of SUNY-Buffalo, Henry Quastler of Brookhaven Na-
tional Lab, and Joseph Engelberg of the University of Kentucky.^*

The participants felt that a ten-week summer institute should be con-
vened— more than a month of regular lectures, discussions, and social activi-
ties undertaken together — as that would be important to stimulate the growth
of a robust theoretical biology. Many theoretical problems seemed ripe for de-
velopment, the group thought — not least, in the words of Engelberg, that "we
should look for biological invariants to see what things are constant in a whole
hypothetical population of many earths. It was felt that this would be related to
life on Mars." In addition to conceiving of a summer institute, the committee
concluded that "1) There is a developing area of theoretical biology; 2) It has
promise of real power of interpretation; 3) To find out more," a larger group,
from six to thirty-five people, should meet for four days; and "4) There should
be a program to support sabbatical leaves, research associates and post
doctorals."-^^ Other members listed on the committee but not present at this first
meeting were: Hans Bremermann of the math department at the University of
California-Berkeley, John Gregg of zoology at Duke University, Herbert Jehle
of physics at George Washington University, Edwin Taylor of the biophysics
department at the University of Chicago, William Taylor of biophysics at Penn
State (where Pollard had moved in 1960 and now chaired the department), and
Martynas Yeas of the microbiology department at SUNY Upstate Medical Center
in Syracuse, New York. A slightly later list also included Howard Pattee of bio-
physics at Stanford and Frederick Williams of zoology at the University of Min-
nesota. Many of them were engaged in work relevant to exobiology and origin
of life studies. Pollard received an exobiology grant for $194,000 in 1964 to
continue his work on "physics of cellular synthesis, growth and division. "^^ The
title of a paper from this period, invoking "artificial synthesis" of a bacterial
cell, reflects the optimism for sweeping theoretical synthesis which was devel-
oping.^' Yeas had pioneered the "metabolism-first" idea, that some kind of com-
plex chemical processes or cycles could have begun before any organism existed
on the primitive Earth; later, when they became enclosed by membranes, one
could begin to speak of them as living systems.'*"

Many of the same personnel were collected by Orr Reynolds and George
Jacobs of NASA, to form a Planetary Biology Advisory Subcommittee of the
Space Sciences and Applications Steering Committee of NASA. This group, con-
cerned in an even more focused way with exobiology matters, first convened
on 22 November 1963, just as the news broke of President John F. Kennedy's
assassination. The group felt that JFK, with his enthusiasm for NASA's mission,
would have wanted their meeting to proceed, so they did. This group initially
included Pollard, Morowitz, Jacobs, Quastler, but also Albert Szent-Gyorgy; it
continued to meet through the early 1970s.

This was the birth of an initiative that bore much fruit over the next sev-
eral decades, such that today a vibrant field of theoretical biology exists and is
considerably more respected within the life sciences than it was in the early

Exobiology, Planetary Protection, Origins of Life 65

1960s. NASA money was indeed forthcoming, channeled through the American
Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), for summer theoretical biology insti-
tutes in 1965, 1966, and 1968. The first and third were organized by Morowitz
and his wife, Lucille, in Fort Collins, Colorado, and Traverse City, Michigan,
respectively.'" The 1966 meeting was organized by James Danielli. According
to Morowitz, these institutes were quite an important stimulus, bringing together
as they did a whole new generation of talents, most of whom became the key
voices in theoretical biology today. Walter Elsasser was one of them. He was a
Manhattan Project physicist, trained in the Copenhagen school, who became in-
terested in biology. Elsasser wrote several books on theoretical biology, the most
recent being Reflections on a Theory of Organisms.'*'^ He had been unable to
get physicists even to listen to him prior to that time. But at these meetings he
found a peer group that, although they criticized his ideas a lot, found them very
interesting and was eager to talk to him. Another was Herbert Jehle of George
Washington University. He was German-bom and had spent World War II in a
concentration camp for being a conscientious objector. He became one of the
physicists who turned their attention to problems in biology in the years after
the war

Thus, yet another broad and important stimulus to life sciences, establish-
ing the careers of many of the brightest of the current generation of stars, was
supplied via the catalyst of NASA Exobiology. The roster of faculty recruited
to teach at the three institutes reads like a who's who of theoretical biology to-
day: at the first workshop (1965) were Brian Goodwin, Robert Rosen, Edwin
Taylor, and Ernest Pollard. "Various people with an interest in theoretical biol-
ogy heard about the workshop and showed up: Herbert Jehle, Walter Elsasser,
Ross Ashby." The third workshop (1968), on Thermodynamics and Statistical
Mechanics in Biology, "brought out a group of young people who were the fu-
ture of Theoretical Biology: George Oster, Art Winfree, Charles Delisi, Jonathan
Roughgarten, Byron Goldstein. On the faculty were Bruno Zimm, Peter Curran
and Ernie Pollard, and Donald Carothers.'"*^

Life at High Temperatures

Around Thanksgiving in 1967 a paper appeared in Science which was
widely noticed in the exobiology community, though its author, Indiana Uni-
versity microbiologist Thomas Brock, had not been an exobiology regular. The
paper reported that bacteria of numerous kinds had been isolated and grown in
culture, from hot springs near boiling temperature in Yellowstone National Park.
And Brock, stimulated by Elso Barghoom and Stanley Tyler's as well as Preston
Cloud's 1965 papers in Science,^ closed with a note on "Thermal Biology and
the Origin and Evolution of Life.'"*^ He observed: "It has been hypothesized
that the microorganisms of hot springs are relicts of primordial forms of life.
Such a speculation does not seem unreasonable when we consider that evidence
of hot spring activity dates back to the Precambrian, and that certain rock

66 The Living Universe

formations (for example the Gunflint chert, 2 bilhon years old), which prob-
ably have been formed in hot spring deposits teem with fossil microorganisms
which resemble the Flexibacteria so common in thermal waters today. If organic
matter, macromolecules, and primordial organisms arose at high temperatures,
low-temperature forms might be derived from them by mutation and selection.'"**

Shortly after the paper came out. Brock "was contacted by several people
from Ames Research Lab, and at one stage an Ames researcher spent a week in
[his] lab, collecting samples for lipid analyses. (The organic geochemists [in-
cluding Kvenvolden and John Hayes] liked lipids as markers in fossils.)." Ac-
cording to Brock: "This was about the time of the moon launchings [i.e., early
1969]. I was invited to Ames to give a seminar, and Cyril Ponnamperuma was
quite interested in my work. He invited me to spend a sabbatical there and I
almost did it in 1969, but a medical problem kept me from coming. Later, Cyril
and some friends organized a two-week trip to Iceland to which I was invited
as the biology expert. This was funded by NASA through Boston College.'"*^

On that trip to Iceland NASA Exobiology personnel, including Dick Young
and Cyril Ponnamperuma, were interested in studying thermophilic bacteria,
along the lines of Brock's suggestion. But they were also interested in seizing
upon a unique opportunity to study an extreme, presumably abiotic environment.
A brand new island, Surtsey, had begun forming near Iceland in 1967 because
of an undersea volcanic eruption. This seemed to Young and Ponnamperuma
an excellent opportunity to study a piece of newly created land as it was first
being colonized by life; the life forms that first moved in must be capable of
living in extreme environments like that of the early prebiotic Earth. Their study
was completed on Surtsey; while examining the hot springs of the Icelandic
mainland in the early spring of 1970 for bacteria such as Brock had found at
Yellowstone, however, Ponnamperuma slipped and his leg went into one of the
boiling pools."** He was hospitalized for weeks, mostly at Stanford University
Medical Center, after being flown back to California. This put him frustratedly
out of action during a crucial phase of analysis of the Murchison meteorite, as
will be described later

Numerous origin of life workers visited Brock's research site at Yellow-
stone, including Preston Cloud and J. William Schopf, trying better to under-
stand the kind of environment in which the microfossils of the Gunflint chert
lived and then were preserved. Australian specialist in stromatolites, Malcolm
Walter, also visited. He discovered that many kinds of filamentous microorgan-
isms, including some in the hot springs of Yellowstone, formed layered stroma-
tolite structures by trapping sediment; previously, it had been thought that
stromatolites found as fossils must almost certainly be formed by cyanobacteria
at moderate temperatures such as those seen today in Shark Bay in western Aus-
tralia."*^ Walter "wrote the textbook" on stromatolites soon afterward.^" By the
late 1980s and early 1990s enormous numbers of fossil stromatolites were known
from Archean era rocks 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. Some, preserved in chert,
have also been found dating back to 3.4 or 3.5 billion years old; they are mor-

Exobiology, Planetary Protection, Origins of Life 67

phologically similar to later ones, but it is not absolutely certain that they were
biotically formed. At least by the mid-Archean era (2.8 billion years and younger)
most of the stromatolite organisms were clearly photosynthetic cyanobacteria,
which seem to be responsible for the process of oxygenating the Earth's atmo-
sphere, although it took hundreds of millions of years before sediments were
sufficiently oxidized to allow any of the gas to build up free in the air.^'

In 1987 Walter was invited by NASA Ames researcher David DesMarais
to bring his stromatolite and hot spring experience to a NASA conference on
planning ahead for Mars exploration. There was much brainstorming about how
to know what kinds of environments to look for as possible places likely for
life. In the wake of Woese's discoveries about thermophilic Archaea and the rev-
elations of life at undersea hydrothermal vents (see chap. 5), the work that had
been done on thermophilic microorganisms now seemed to NASA more relevant
than ever to exobiology. Walter had never thought of NASA as a source of pri-
mary research funding prior to that time, he says (though he had been a mem-
ber of Schopf's 1979-1980 NASA-funded Precambrian Paleobiology Research
Group [to be discussed in chap. 5]). But by 1989 he wrote to DesMarais inquir-
ing about NASA support, got connected with the Exobiology Program, and has
been receiving some degree of NASA funding ever since.^^ Indeed, the 1987
brainstorming led to a follow-up Mars-oriented workshop on hydrothermal eco-
systems, partially sponsored by CIBA Corporation, in 1995.^^

The Chicken and Egg Problem

Origins of life (OOL) research was dramatically expanding during these
years, above and beyond NASA's influence; the third international conference
in France in 1970 was the largest yet. But the more researchers learned, the more
they were faced with dilemmas to which there was no obvious solution. As we
saw in the debates between Fox and Miller in the last chapter, by the late 1950s
there had already emerged the central catch-22 of origin of life research: if DNA
and RNA contain the information required to make the proteins crucial for me-
tabolism, yet DNA and RNA cannot be synthesized and cannot function with-
out the help of numerous indispensable protein enzymes, how can such a
chicken-egg system have ever come about to begin with? This dispute has be-
come more heated in the years since, with groups polarized into "metabolism
first" and "replication first."^" A discussion of two recent works on this prob-
lem can help outline the development of ideas in origin of life thinking from
the late 1950s onward.^^

In his book Origins of Life Freeman Dyson suggests a set of intermediate
steps which he calls the "dual origin hypothesis" — that is, that metabolizing en-
zymes enclosed within a membrane, by far the simpler component of living sys-
tems, probably developed first; then later the much more highly constrained and
improbable process of high-fidelity replication arose. Replicating molecules
could have arisen separately or, more likely, within the membrane-enclosed

68 The Living Universe

metabolizing systems, as Morowitz emphasizes.^* In either case, Dyson argues,
the development of a symbiotic relationship between the two would then pro-
duce systems that could begin, over a long time, to approach the last common
ancestor of all organisms alive today. Dyson is careful to point out that the dual-
origin hypothesis is one he finds persuasive on philosophical grounds, not be-
cause it is supported by any conclusive piece of evidence. He finds the possible
analogy with Lynn Margulis's theory of symbiotic origin of eukaryotic cells very
compelling, for example. ^^ It is of considerable interest to see a scientist so
frankly admit to his philosophical preconceptions and offer them for our scrutiny.
The contrast is so refreshing given the bulk of scientific writing that attempts
to disguise these motivating wellsprings and to construct, instead, accounts of
rational, stepwise logical processes of "blank slate," objective discoveries.

Being a physicist allows Dyson to see the extent to which a lot of biolo-
gists' thinking is predisposed by their own philosophical assumptions — for in-
stance, why such an overwhelming majority of life scientists trained since Watson
and Crick believe information-carrying molecules are more fundamental to life
than biochemical metabolism. ^^ This, despite the fact that, ever since research-
ers have seen the origin of life to be predicated upon the origin of DNA, RNA,
or some other more primitive information-carrying molecule, the result has been
the chicken-egg problem described earlier. He is less aware, or at least does not
comment on, the degree to which his own reasoning is being guided just as force-
fully by notions about "hardware" and "software" inherited from the culture of
computer technology.^' This is not to imply that use of these analogies in thinking
about living systems is necessarily faulty but, rather, that, just as the dominance
of machines in industrial, scientific cultures cannot be said to be historically
unrelated to the growth of the mechanistic view of life from 1850 to 1950, these
researchers ought at least to note that the ideas of hardware and software are
not merely disconnected intellectual "ideas" floating around but also fundamen-
tally cultural resources, being drawn upon here by scientists. Thus, it is worth
asking the question: do these ideas come into the scientific arena freighted with
any other interesting cultural or philosophical baggage?

Dyson opens with a gracious acknowledgment that he has not represented
the ideas of some of the more prominent thinkers in the field, among them J. B. S.
Haldane, J. D. Bernal, Sidney Fox, Hyman Hartman, Pier Luisi, Julian Hiscox,
Lee Smolin, and Stuart Kauffman. That being said, however, Dyson has left out
a bit too much in some places. Because the book "outlines a theory which ex-
plains how life began, and in fact scientifically defines what life itself is," it
surely needs to credit those workers, at least in passing, when Dyson makes cen-
tral ideas for which those others were primarily responsible. For example, Dyson
emphasizes the need to distinguish between replication and reproduction in or-
der to break the logical catch-22 deadlock that results when one considers DNA-
or RNA-centered systems to be the sine qua non of life.^" Dyson gives John
Von Neumann credit for emphasizing the distinction between replication and
metabolism. This is the most significant distinction Dyson rightly emphasizes

Exobiology, Planetary Protection, Origins of Life 69

in his book. But one can only wonder why he lauds Erwin Schrodinger and Von
Neumann's early and vague approaches to this distinction, as in Schrodinger's
influential 1944 book What Is Life? while so studiously avoiding mention of
Sidney Fox and his school — those who first made the issue of "proteins first"
versus the "nucleic acid monopoly" central in the origin of life debate. Of course,
the two big-name physicists have become revered in science (and Dyson him-
self is a physicist), while Fox was a protein chemist who eventually became
marginalized by the mainstream origin of life community.*' So, if one is con-
structing a "forerunners" pedigree for one's most important idea, perhaps the
temptation is overwhelming to attribute that idea to winners and silently pass
over losers, especially if one at the outset intends to write a highly condensed
narrative that disclaims any attempt at comprehensiveness. From a historian's
point of view this practice is in itself an object of study.

Dyson points out that Schrodinger saw biology "through [Max] Delbriick's
eyes," and historians have elaborated at some length on the construction of a
master narrative of the history of molecular biology which emphasizes only the
line from Schrodinger, Delbriick, and Salvador Luria to Watson and Crick. Dyson
says that thus Delbriick's focus on replication (and later on nucleic acids) as
the central feature of the origin of life gained undue prominence in the field
and came to dominate the mind-set of most researchers. Here again, however.
Fox (and his son Ronald) anticipated Dyson, stating this insight in terms of "para-
digms" and their control of thinking in the field repeatedly over the last twenty-
five years.^2 Thus, Dyson's failure to cite them, at least in passing, stands out.

Maynard Smith and Szathmary's The Origins of Life sets out to describe
and explain what they plausibly argue are the eight major qualitative transitions
that have occurred in the history of life since the origin of replicating molecules.*^
The book is an eloquent and very illuminating analysis of these transitions and
of some very important parallel trends among them.^ But, as a result of such
breadth of conceptual reach, it manages to survey only somewhat superficially
the origin of life per se. The major transitions they address are: replicating
molecules^populations of molecules in compartments; independent
replicators— ^chromosomes; RNA as gene and enzyme-^DNA and protein;
prokaryote— >eukaryote; asexual clones— )sexual populations; protists— ^animals,
plants, and fungi; solitary individuals— ^colonies; primate societies^human
societies and the origin of language.

In Maynard Smith and Szathmary's The Origins of Life, from its first page,
the focus is on information. The question of metabolism being of equal impor-
tance, let alone first in time (as in Dyson), is very briefly raised,*^ only to be
dismissed or minimized: their overall usage betrays a strong bias toward an
"information-first" view of life. Their approach clearly assumes that life is syn-
onymous with replication.**

There is no more historical a phenomenon in modem biology than the
dialectically related rise of information theory and computers and the simultaneous
importation of such analysis into biological thinking, beginning no later than

70 The Living Universe

Schrodinger's 1944 work What Is Life?^'' Maynard Smith and Szathmary tackle
this strikingly parallel development of concepts right away. It would seem strange
or incomprehensible to Darwin, they say, that template reproduction allows trans-
mission of instructions in a homogeneous-looking, as yet unformed egg or zy-
gote. The idea is much less strange to us because "we are familiar with the idea
that patterns of magnetism on a magnetic tape can carry the instructions for pro-
ducing a symphony. "^^ Indeed, they close their book with a tantalizing guess
that the move to transmitting information in electronic form may be potentially
a transition on the scale of the other major transitions around which the book is
framed. It is astute of the authors to recognize how much our cultural experi-
ence enables our view, especially on questions of such fundamental importance
as "what is life?"

Being more or less complete advocates of the information-first approach
to conceptualizing life, however, they seem to miss the other implication of the
power of historical context. If our cultural experience enables our view, it also
simultaneously constrains it. The primacy of computers and electronic infor-
mation in our lives makes images of "programming" of instincts and "hard-
wiring" of certain traits highly compelling metaphors for how we think about
"life" in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first century, high-tech Western soci-
ety. But these metaphors tend to channel one's thinking strongly, above and be-
yond the actual experimental evidence, as in the nature-nurture debate, in which
"master molecule" and "inborn hard-wiring" metaphors have boosted the stock
of biological determinism far above even the rapidly growing knowledge base
of molecular genetics. We may well reflect on the dominance of such models
when they say, "a living being resembles a computer, rather than just a program,
although it has its own program as subsystem." The irony of the back-and-forth
relations between culture and nature is never more provocative than in this pas-
sage,*' in which computers and computer "viruses" are used as the standard
against which to evaluate whether biological viruses should be thought of as
truly alive. Is this not putting the cart before the horse in some fundamental on-
tological sense?

As we shall see in origin of life debates, the possibly crucial question that
gets drowned out by talk of the primacy of information (and thus of nucleic
acids) is: can there be any other central characteristic of living systems as fun-
damental as, or perhaps even more fundamental than, information? Granted,
Maynard Smith and Szathmary give a brilliant and powerful analysis of events
since the evolution of information-carrying molecules. But their bias leaves us
with the chicken-egg problem: if metabolism is dominated mostly by proteins
but is a prerequisite for the functioning of nucleic acid information molecules,
how can a system like our current living cell, even the simplest prokaryote, with
each of these two parts totally dependent upon the other, ever have evolved in
the first place? This is the issue upon which Dyson's book is so helpful.

That is not to say that Dyson is the first to raise this issue. As John Farley
makes clear, ever since Leonard Troland's 1914 paper emphasizing autocata-

Exobiology, Planetary Protection, Origins of Life 71

lytic enzymes and Muller's 1926 gene-first response, as well as Oparin's 1924
emphasis on metabolism, this tension has been a central focus of debate and
discussion in the origin of life literatureJ" Noted advocates toward Muller's end
of the spectrum have included Norman Horowitz and Carl Sagan. Toward the
opposite end have been A. I. Oparin, J. D. Bemal, N. W. Pirie, and Sidney Fox.
The boom of interest in an "RNA world," beginning with Altman and Cech's
1982 discovery of catalytic RNA molecules ("ribozymes"), was precisely be-
cause it was hoped this phenomenon would finally offer a way out of the im-
passe that dominated much of twentieth-century discussion. If the simplest
nucleic acid information molecules can also simultaneously perform the enzyme
role, previously thought only to be a property of proteins, then catalytic RNA
molecules could be the "missing link" bridging the gap between these two now
separate but interdependent functions. Maynard Smith and Szathmary clearly
hope ribozymes offered the solution to the catch-22.^' But this now seems to
have been excessively optimistic. ^^ por, although RNA does seem to have the
dual capabilities to bridge the gap, its monomers are so difficult to form spon-
taneously and are so short-lived under primitive Earth conditions, that the ques-
tion of how to get from an abiotic world to the RNA world is not much easier
to solve than before the RNA world transitional stage was known (see chap. 5
for more discussion). ^^

"Gemischers" versus "Analytikers"

A related distinction of long standing between origin of life researchers
was whether they pursued a "synthetic," or "constructionist" approach, as Fox
called his work, or an analytic one. One of the things Dick Young supported in
Fox's work was the basic approach of combining substances (in the style of
Oparin's coacervate mixtures or the "plasmogeny" of Alfonso Herrera, both ac-
tive in the 1920s and 1930s).^'* Miller and Horowitz were almost as dismissive
of Herrera's work as they were of Fox's, although they thought the creation of
"simulata" (what had in the 1930s been called "cell model experiments") an
interesting curiosity. Miller wrote to tell Horowitz about Herrera:

Oro, [Robert] Sanchez and I were in Mexico City in early May at a
symposium honoring Alfonso Herrera, who from about 1900 to 1940,
conducted thousands of experiments trying to make "organized ele-
ments" from inorganic or organic materials. Some of the results are im-
pressive (e.g. mitotic spindles) but of course this has nothing to do with
the origin of life. Herrera's "organized elements" make Fox's micro-
spheres look sick by comparison. Orgel, Oro and I have been talking (I
don't know whether it will progress beyond this stage) about translat-
ing Herrera's book and perhaps including previous work in this area as
well as more modem efforts (Fox) in this direction. We were even talk-
ing about borrowing your expression and calling the book "Simulata."''^

72 The Living Universe

Horowitz replied: "Funny, I never heard of Herrera. It just goes to show you
what making a lot of noise will do for a man. [i.e., Fox]. Fox gets written up in
every other issue oi C & E News, while Herrera, whose work was similar, is
unknown. Incidentally, I checked the word 'simulata' in the dictionary, and it
seems to be non-existent. The correct word is 'simulacra.' Of course, if you prefer
my invention, you are welcome to it."^*

Much of Oparin's work on coacervates was of this kind (and thus simi-
larly suspect in the eyes of Horowitz and Miller). The experiments of Krishna
Bahadur, chemistry professor at the University of Allahabad in India, could also
be seen as in this tradition. Bahadur's structures, called "jeewanu," are similar
in size to Fox's microspheres, though they are complex mineral-organic struc-
tures. They have also been shown to have photosynthetic and nitrogen-fixing
activity and thus belong to the "autotrophs first" approach rather than the Oparin-
Haldane "hetrotrophs first" school of thought.^^ Some experiments by Adolph
Smith and Gary Steinman can also be considered within the synthetic approach
to origin of life studies; these experiments involving formaldehyde and ammo-
nium thiocyanate are based on the work of A. L. Herrera.^^ Carl Woese's and
Leslie Orgel's work, by contrast, each trying to work out the origins of the ge-
netic code, were more in the analytic tradition.^^ So was John Oro's work on
"organic cosmochemistry," including his first prominent discovery, of the for-
mation of adenine from ammonium cyanide.^"

In a 1973 review Lynn Margulis used similar constructionist/analytical cat-
egories to describe current research in the origin of life; she evidently thought
both approaches had potential, as she called them, the "gimish" [sic] (more
commonly gemisch, a Yiddish word for "mixture") and the "microanalytic" ap-
proaches:

In both, those gases, liquids and substrata thought to be reasonably abun-
dant are brought together under . . . conditions thought to be reason-
ably plausible for the early Earth: Energy is supplied . . . and after some
period of time the materials produced are analyzed. At the end of the
experiment the gimishers ask: "what has been made?" The analytikers
prefer to carefully control each of the inputs . . . and ask at each step:
"what exactly is produced, which is the most abundant product, how
can the conditions be altered to yield more of some familiar biological
molecules?" The results of many experiments of these sorts have been
impressive to some of us.^'

Clays

In reviewing a book by A. Graham Cairns-Smith, a physical chemist at
the University of Glasgow in Scotland, Margulis noted that neither approach
impressed him.^^ Cairns-Smith saw early on the impossibility of assuming a sud-
den, chance appearance of the whole nucleic acid-based replication system as

Exobiology, Planetary Protection, Origins of Life H

we know it.^^ He sought a way out of the chicken-egg dilemma by following
up on a suggestion made in 1949 by J. D. Beraal, that charged clay surfaces
could have served as binding places in the prebiotic environment, attracting or-
ganic monomers and holding them in close proximity, thus greatly facilitating
their combining to form larger, more complex organic polymers.^ Caims-Smith's
suggestion was that clay or crystalline minerals could have served a consider-
ably larger role: because of repeating patterns of charges in their structure, he
suggested those patterns could act as primitive heredity mechanisms, making
the prototype for life "clay genes," as it were. Then at some later stage, when a
more complex organic heredity molecule had finally appeared, there could be a
"genetic takeover" by that more efficient, sophisticated information molecule.
Margulis found the theory provocative and highly suggestive. Cairns-Smith pre-
sented increasingly detailed and complex versions of his theory, first at the
Roussel UCLAF origin of life conference in Paris in 1973, at a 1974 sympo-
sium at the Royal Society of London (at which James Lovelock also presented
a version of the Gaia hypothesis),^^ then in a 1982 book.*^

Interest in the theory has grown steadily, but only when Hyman Hartman
joined forces and applied with him did Caims-Smith first obtain any NASA fund-
ing. In 1970 Paecht-Horowitz, Berger, and Katchalsky at Israel's Weizmann In-
stitute demonstrated that montmorillonite clays promote polymerization of
protein-like polypeptide chains from amino acid adenylates (esters formed from
amino acids and adenosine monophosphate [AMP]).^'' By the late 1970s Caims-
Smith's ideas had sparked a fair amount of interest at Ames Research Center,
according to Hartman: "It was the Israelis, Amos Banin, Noam Lahav and co-
workers who brought an interest in clays to Moffett Field [Ames]. James Law-
less, Sherwood Chang and David White began to use clays to polymerize amino
acids, etc. Banin interpreted the Mars data from Viking as due to iron-rich
clays."^^ And by 1982 interest was sufficiently great that NASA supplied funds
for Cairns-Smith and Hartman to organize a conference on "Clay Minerals and
the Origin of Life" at Glasgow University (fig. 3.1).^^ While some research
groups such as Stanley Miller's have remained highly skeptical, the clay theory
has received a fair amount of publicity, if not a lot of NASA funding.^" It was
NRC/NASA Ames postdoc money, for the most part, which brought the Israe-
lis to Ames to work on clays." And Leslie Orgel used some of his NASA exo-
biology money over the years, particularly in the 1990s, to investigate the role
clay minerals might play in helping to catalyze polymerization of nucleotides
into oligonucleotides.

Moon Rock Analysis and the Murchison Meteorite

One of the chief tasks for which exobiology scientists saw the need to
prepare was the scientific lode of samples that Apollo would be returning from
the Moon, by mid-1969 if the ambitious program schedule was kept. (In fact,
after several weeks in quarantine, the first samples, from Apollo 11, were divided

74 The Living Universe

Figure 3. 1 . Conference on Clays and the Origin of Life, University of Glasgow, Scotland,
18-24 July 1983. This conference was convened by Graham Cairns-Smith and Hyman
Hartman, with NASA funding assistance. Left to right, front row: T. J. Pinnavia, Hyman
Hartman, Harmke Kamminga, (behind) Gustaf Arrhenius, Krishna Bahadur, H. Van Olphen,
Sherwood Chang, M. M. Mordand, unidentified woman, G. S. Odin, S. W. Bailey, A. L.
Mackay, W. D. Keller Second row: R. C. Reynolds Jr, A. G. Cairns-Smith, Everett Shock.
Third row: D. D. Eberl, Adam Cairns-Smith, H. Harder, P. L. Hall, (right of globe) Armin
Weiss, James Lawless. Fourth row: W. J. McHardy, P. S. Braterman, N. W. Pirie, S. F.
Mason, Noam Lahav. Back row: R. F. Giese, J. M. Adams, D. P. Bloch, D. S. Snell, Mme
Odin and children. Not in photo: T. Baird, Amos Banin, L. D. Barron, P. J. Boston, R. C.
Mackenzie, R. Mohan, P. Smart. (Courtesy G. Cairns-Smith.)

up among the labs waiting for them by the early fall of that year.) High-purity
reagents, ultra-clean glassware, and sterile containments with glove boxes and
other facilities had been prepared at a number of locations; among them John
Oro's lab at the University of Houston, Preston Cloud's lab at the University of
California-Santa Barbara, Warren Meinschein's lab at Indiana University, and
Keith Kvenvolden's lab, in Cyril Ponnamperuma's Chemical Evolution Branch
at Ames, had all been developed with substantial NASA funding.

Cloud was a well-known geologist, a veteran of NASA meetings, and
member of the NAS. He had looked into geochemistry in addition to his work
on stromatolites and Precambrian paleobiology generally. Oro was a biochem-
ist who had followed up the Miller-Urey experiment with work on pathways
for the prebiotic synthesis of adenine and other nucleotides from very simple
starting molecules common in interstellar space. ^^ Meinschein had been a
geochemist for the petroleum industry; interest in organic compounds on the

Exobiology, Planetary Protection, Origins of Life 75

ij^ .^K'^

■

i ^N

H ' ^' ' ' ^s

Bw 1

^ '

^^^;-.^__

^■^ ■■"^ ' ^'Pi^*-

- ,,-t ' ■ •

.::» ■ ■ •■: ^

^■--^C^^^^ '

m( ■ ( ,j<.~ ;€ ■ ^*' W

;

Figure 3.2. The NASA Ames team responsible for the initial chemical analysis of the
Murchison meteorite organics in 1970. Left to right: Etta Peterson, Jose Flores, Katherine
Pering, Cyril Ponnamperuma, James Lawless, Keith Kvenvolden. Kvenvolden directed
the analysis that found that the amino acids were racemic and thus of extraterrestrial origin.
Pering, working directly for Ponnamperuma, analyzed the meteorite hydrocarbons. (NASA
photo, courtesy of K. Pering.)

Orgueil meteorite had inspired him to move into academia to work full-time on
extraterrestrial materials. '■'' Kvenvolden had also been a noted geochemist in the
oil industry before being hired by Ponnamperuma to, as he saw it, engage in
the scientific adventure of a lifetime, preparing for the geocheinical analysis of
the first rocks ever to be studied from the Moon.^''

By the time samples began arriving, the Ames group consisted of Pon-
namperuma, Kvenvolden, mass spectroscopist James Lawless, organic geochem-
ist Katherine Pering, and technicians Jose "Jesse" Flores and Etta Peterson (fig.
3.2). At first some groups thought they had detected native amino acids^^ and
porphyrins'*^ in the lunar samples, but upon careful control studies and analyses
rerun by several labs, including those of the highest cleanliness standards, these
claims did not pan out. Other than carbide from solar wind, the only carbon on
the Moon seemed to be from a tiny amount of cosmic dust.^^ The Moon had no
native organics, no prebiotic synthesis, going on. (Or, if it was occurring, the
intense bombardment with solar radiation was destroying such compounds as
fast as they could form.) The labs did, however, acquire truly "blank" organic
standards this way, which could be compared with any other extraterrestrial
sample that might come along.

76 The Living Universe

It is truly fortunate that the Moon did not contain living organisms, from
a back contamination point of view. On the first Apollo sample return mission,
Apollo 11, it was only realized a few weeks before launch that the recovery ship
scheduled to pluck the sealed capsule from the ocean did not have a crane strong
enough to lift the entire capsule up onto the deck of the ship. An elaborate plan
had been devised by the Planetary Biology Subcommittee, a scientific panel con-
vened by NASA, whereby the capsule would be lifted while still sealed onto
the deck, bolted directly to the portable quarantine facility on the ship by an
airlock, and only then would the astronauts open the hatch and transfer them-
selves and the samples in sterile fashion into the portable quarantine chamber.
The subcommittee was presented by NASA officials in April 1969 with the fait
accompli that the necessary crane could only be fitted on a recovery ship after
several months (in time for the Apollo 12 mission); the procedure would thus
be fatally compromised on the Apollo 11 mission by lifting the astronauts aboard
separately, after they opened the hatch of the potentially contaminated space-
craft floating in the ocean, exposing both air and sea to any potential contami-
nant organisms from the Moon. The subcommittee met on 3 June 1969 and
drafted a letter of protest, which was sent to NASA administrator Thomas Paine,
but its members were given to understand that nobody less than President Ri-
chard Nixon himself could authorize a postponement of the Apollo 11 mission,
and there was no evidence he would do so.'^ The scientists did not seriously
believe that any life existed on the Moon, but they were aggravated at being
asked to create a scientifically sound containment protocol, only to have it ig-
nored at the last minute because of apparently political concerns. They felt this
set a very bad precedent for future cases, such as Mars, where the chance of
native life was felt to be considerably greater than on the Moon.''

In a fascinating case of historical contingency, a carbonaceous chondrite
(a class of meteorites containing a significant amount of carbon) fell near
Murchison, Australia, on 28 September 1 969, just as the lunar sample labs were
geared up and ready for unprecedentedly clean analysis of extraterrestrial ma-
terial. Local officials, including a postmaster in that rural area, collected frag-
ments and a great many were purchased by American collections. The Field
Museum in Chicago obtained quite a lot of material, and some went to the me-
teorite collection in the Geology Department at Arizona State University, under
the curatorship of Carleton Moore. The research group there included George
Yuen and John Cronin, biochemists who first turned their attention to meteorite
organics only after the fall of the Murchison rock (fig. 3.3). Moore realized what
a unique opportunity was available, given the preparedness of the clean labs at
Ames and other places. Past claims of organic compounds in meteorites had al-
ways been compromised by a high probability of contamination. Chemist Paul
B. Hamilton of DuPont had put it thus: "what appears to be the pitter patter of
heavenly feet is probably instead the print of an earthly thumb."'"" Now labs
existed with truly "clean blank" standards, personnel who had trained intensively
for several years to seek and eliminate all possible sources of contamination from

Exobiology, Planetary Protection, Origins of Life 77

Figure 3.3. George Yuen (left) and John Cronin {right) in the meteorite
biochemical analysis lab at Arizona State University, c. 1986. (Courtesy
J. Cronin, ASU Research News.)

their reagents, and state-of-the-art gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers.
So, Moore sent a sample of the Murchison meteorite to Ponnamperuma at Ames
in late 1969 or early 1970."" Ponnamperuma gave most of it to Kvenvolden
and told him to put his team to work on analyzing it for any organic biomolecules
such as amino acids. '"^ He gave a small subsample to geochemist Katherine
Pering and assigned her to analyze the hydrocarbons, then he went on the ex-
pedition to Iceland in which his leg was badly burned in one of the hot springs
there.""

Once the analyses were run, Kvenvolden visited Ponnamperuma in the
hospital at nearby Stanford Medical Center and told him some extremely excit-
ing news; not only did the meteorite definitely contain several different amino

78 The Living Universe

acids, but the amino acids occurred in racemic mixtures as well. This was a cru-
cial new finding: earthly contaminants would be entirely the L-form of amino
acids, since that is the only form Earth life makes or consumes. A racemic mix-
ture was what one would expect for extraterrestrial synthesis by purely chemi-
cal means, that is, Miller-Urey style. In fact, the range of organic compounds
in the meteorite was very similar to the range of compounds that had been found
in Miller-Urey type synthesis experiments.

At this point, however, Kvenvolden says he got a very rude shock. Pon-
namperuma angrily told him: "You are no longer responsible for this project.
And don't tell anyone about these results." After a long and heated argument,
in which Kvenvolden went over Ponnamperuma's head to Chuck Klein and even-
tually to Hans Mark, head of the Ames Research Center, Ponnamperuma re-
lented, and the paper was published with the entire team as authors and
Kvenvolden as lead author. "^"^ To be fair, it must be noted that at least one of
the other participants does not agree with certain parts of Kvenvolden's account
and thinks it totally uncharacteristic of Ponnamperuma to act in such a petty
manner."" It is fortunate that, in the end, one of the more spectacular results
produced by exobiology work up until that time was not tainted by whatever
personal difficulties may have existed among some of the researchers.

On balance it should be said that Ponnamperuma's contributions were
many: his experiments, bringing scientists from all over the world (including
Oparin) to NASA Ames Research Center, and his roles as journal editor and as
an administrator. These were an important part of why so much happened in
exobiology in these years. Kvenvolden, for example, says "we have to give Cyril
credit, he was the one that made the contact with Carlton Moore at ASU — and
we got the [Murchison] sample and it was pristine. . . . Then we began to get
these great results."'"^ It is an age-old question in science: does the credit go to
the person who puts the sample in the analytic machine, or does it go to the
person who gets the sample, gets the funding, organizes the enterprise, gets the
staff, and so forth, who had the vision and made it happen?

Further analysis on the Murchison in years since, especially in the lab of
John Cronin and Sandra Pizzarello at Arizona State University, has found doz-
ens of amino acids and many other organic compounds present, all of reliably
extraterrestrial origin.'"^ These are some of the more firm data that exobiology
still has to stand upon. And they agree remarkably well with the detected or-
ganic molecules found in giant molecular clouds in interstellar space. When
Cronin and Pizzarello announced on Valentine's Day 1997 that they had found
enantiomeric excesses of some of the amino acids that were certainly of extra-
terrestrial origin, in some cases as much as a 56:44 ratio of L:D rather than the
expected 50:50 racemic mixture, it was further exciting news.'°^ For the first
time it became possible to say with certainty that the preference for L-amino
acids in earthly life forms might have been based on a bias that already existed
in the organic molecules being delivered to Earth from space at the time life
first arose. The question of how the stereospecific preferences of living things

Exobiology, Planetary Protection, Origins of Life 79

got Started had been a mystery from the time that Louis Pasteur first discovered
such preferences in 1848. Now, in trying to eventually solve that mystery, the
new field of exobiology had contributed some solid pieces of data for the first
time since. Even faced with a mystery on the scale of how life originated, exo-
biology had won some firm handholds.'*"

Chapter 4

"L^ikingj to c^ltars

zAn

major milestone in the history of exo-
biology was the 1976 landings on Mars by two NASA Viking spacecraft. By
the time of their launch in 1975 there had been no more ambitious planetary
exploration mission than the Viking 1 and 2 spacecraft. Each carried fourteen
experiments on the lander section of the spacecraft alone and more on the or-
biting platform from which the lander was detached. ' The mission cost a bil-
lion dollars, of which $59 million was for the biology instrument package (fig.
4.1). Another experiment onboard the lander, the gas chromatograph-mass spec-
trometer (GCMS), also cost $41 million and was interpreted in conjunction with
the biology experiments. This was more money than was ever spent, before or
since, for a single exobiology project or mission.

Viking did not detect unambiguous signs of life on Mars. The overwhelm-
ing consensus of the research community at the time was that the experiments
proved Mars was lifeless, indeed, too hostile for life or organic molecules even
to exist, at least in the top one meter or so of regolith (soil). Yet the mission
provided enormous amounts of data relevant to exobiology, not least of which
was the relative isotopic proportions of gases in the Martian atmosphere. This
data was crucial to the recognition that one class of meteorites found on Earth,
designated "Shergottite-Nakhlite-Chassignite" (SNC), are almost certainly of
Martian origin (see chap. 8). In addition, the Viking results were striking con-
firmation of Lovelock and Margulis's predictions, based on their Gaia hypoth-
esis, that Mars would be lifeless because of what was already known about its
atmospheric gases from Earth-based observations. Norman Horowitz, not with-
out his poetic or humanitarian moments, found inspiration from the very lack
of life on Mars, as he interpreted the findings. Coming to a conclusion that
sounds more like what one would expect from Carl Sagan (but from the oppo-
site direction), Horowitz summed up the mood thus: "The failure to find life on
Mars was a disappointment, but it was also a revelation. ... it is now virtually
certain that the earth is the only life-bearing planet in our region of the galaxy.
We have awakened from a dream. We are alone, we and the other species, with
whom we share the earth. If the explorations of the solar system in our time
bring home to us a realization of the uniqueness of our small planet and thereby

Vikingi to Mars 81

Figure 4.1. Harold "Chuck" Klein, showing the Viking Biology instrument to the team
that helped in its design. Left to right: Klein, Vance Oyama, Genelle Deverall, Glenn
Carle, Richard Johnson, Gary Bowman, Bill Ashley, Fritz Woeller, Dwight Moody, Bill
Chun. Seated, at end of table: Bill Berry, Bonnie Dalton, Marjorie Lehwalt, Bonnie Berdahl.
(Courtesy H. Klein.)

increase our resolve to avoid self-destruction, they will have contributed more
than just science to the human future. "^

The process of thinking about how to define life was profoundly shaped
in the exobiology community by brainstorming to design experiments capable
of detecting life.^ Thus, for Carl Sagan, Joshua Lederberg, and others, the Viking
data could not be ignored and led to rethinking their basic assumptions. Those,
like Sagan, who still held irrepressible hopes of finding life in the cosmos, were
chastened by the Viking results; nonetheless, they did not give up their quest,
turning more of their attention, for example, to comets and to SETl.'* Indeed,
by the 1996 discovery of putative fossil microorganisms in Martian meteorite
ALH84001, their hopes were given new life, even on Mars, though the evidence
appeared to support at best only ancient life there, billions of years ago.

A very small minority of scientists, most important among them Gilbert
Levin, continued to believe the Viking results had indeed shown life on Mars.
For them the revival caused by the Mars meteorite in 1996 felt like even more
of a vindication. For James Lovelock the Viking project was the cradle of his

82 The Living Universe

Gaia hypothesis for precisely the opposite reason: because of his certainty that
there would not be life on Mars, at least not at present.

Viking, then, represented an important moment of redefinition and refo-
cusing in the history of exobiology, even if the results could be read in very
different ways. With this in mind, let us turn to a close look at the history of
this mission and of its home at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Lovelock, Horowitz, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

As early as 1959, Richard Davies and Max Gumpel at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory near Pasadena, California, were already at work on planetary exo-
biology. They got an early NASA grant to investigate ideas for an infrared (IR)
Mars probe for detecting extraterrestrial life. Davies and Gumpel gave a pre-
liminary report on this work as a talk at the 11-15 January 1960 first COSPAR
meeting.^ JPL took an early lead in exobiology work, and, because of its con-
tinuous role in planning and design of the spacecraft that would explore the moon
and planets, it has always been a focus of much of that side of exobiology. By
contrast, until recently NASA Ames was more focused on the origin of life.*
Indeed, in 1959 a JPL report already called for development of new, larger rocket
boosters that could carry a new generation of automated lunar and planetary
probes. Then, after Soviet attempts at Mars launches in October 1960, a suc-
cessful Venus probe launch in February 1961, Yuri Gagarin's flight in April 1961,
and the Bay of Pigs debacle that came so quickly on its heels, the JPL became
much more active in developing planetary exploration missions and the hard-
ware to support them. Nothing less than recovering national prestige was at stake,
in addition to ongoing scientific interests.^

NASA was moving quickly to recruit the best talent in instrumentation
and basic science from all over the world. One man who combined both was
research chemist and biologist James Lovelock, who in 1957 had also devel-
oped a highly sensitive new device, the electron capture detector (BCD) for gas
chromatography. This device allowed detection of trace organic molecules in
the atmosphere down to the parts per trillion range for the first time.^ On 9 May
1961 NASA official Abraham Silverstein wrote to Lovelock, inviting him to
come to the United States to work on development of the gas chromatograph
(GC) for the lunar Surveyor spacecraft at JPL.' Lovelock eagerly agreed. His
first NASA grant, for $30,100, was awarded before year's end and was chan-
neled through the University of Houston,'" where a tenured professorship for
Lovelock at Baylor College of Medicine was arranged, "with a dream salary of
$20,000 per annum." He was to live in Houston with his family for two and a
half years and commute regulariy to JPL for much of the next eleven years; he
continued to visit JPL periodically as a consultant until just before the launch
of the Vikings in 1975." Because of ideas that he first developed on physical
life detection experiments, in March 1965 Lovelock was also put to work on an
early Mars probe design, called Voyager, among other things to develop the GC

Vikings to Mars 83

as a life detection instrument.'^ His description of the discussions between sci-
entists and engineers is highly evocative of the heady sense of mission at JPL
during the 1960s, as designing and launching probes to the Moon and then the
planets became a reality.'^ "As one whose childhood was illuminated by the writ-
ings of Jules Verne and Olaf Stapledon I was delighted to have the chance of
discussing at first hand the plans for investigating Mars," he recalled some fif-
teen years later.''*

As Lovelock describes it, the early meetings at JPL on life detection strat-
egies for Mars probes had quickly settled into a rut. The strategies all sought to
detect Earth-like microorganisms by immersing them in liquid culture broths
and then looking for their metabolic by-products.'^ This was true of Vishniac's
Wolf Trap, of Levin's Gulliver, and of Vance Oyama's early ideas. Lovelock
thought it was far too limiting to make such narrow, "Earthcentric" assumptions
about potential Mars organisms. Challenged to come up with a more robust strat-
egy to look for evidence of life, he argued that one ought to look for entropy-
reduction phenomena.'*' After a few days of thinking it over, he suggested the
most obvious activity of living things which offsets entropy was that they keep
the gas composition of a planetary atmosphere far from chemical equilibrium.
For example, if a planet's atmosphere contained significant amounts of both
methane and oxygen simultaneously, for any length of time. Lovelock argued,
this is so far from the equilibrium condition that it is strong presumptive evi-
dence of life. Living things must be constantly replenishing two such reactive
gases or their levels would not remain high for long.

By September 1965 geneticist Norman Horowitz had become the new head
of the Biology Division at JPL, a position he held until 1970 (while still work-
ing part-time on the faculty of nearby CalTech). As such, Horowitz came to over-
see much of the planning of life detection experiments. Although Congress was
not looking favorably at the Voyager mission (the project was postponed so much
by a vote of 22 December 1965 as to effectively kill it),'^ Lovelock had pub-
lished a first paper on his thinking and was on the verge of attaining a powerful
new insight.'^ He realized that the gases that living organisms most actively af-
fect, especially carbon dioxide, methane, oxygen, and water vapor, are just those
gases that most dramatically shape the climate of the planet. He claims to have
had a flash of insight one September day at JPL, in which he first wondered if
living organisms might actively control the climate of a planet, via feedback
mechanisms, to keep the conditions there favorable for their own survival and
growth. Immediately blurting out his insight in discussions with Horowitz, Carl
Sagan, and Dian Hitchcock, he found them skeptical but sufficiently intrigued
to encourage him in his thinking." Indeed, Hitchcock, a philosopher by train-
ing, had been collaborating on Lovelock's ideas about physical life detection
for some months already; the two would eventually publish together in Sagan's
journal IcarusP-^

Horowitz, according to Lovelock, "was open-minded": "although he dis-
agreed with my views about the Earth and its atmosphere, he thought, as the

84 The Living Universe

good scientist he was, that they should be heard." Horowitz arranged for Love-
lock to give a paper on his ideas to the American Astronautical Society^', and
he invited Lovelock to the second NASA conference on the origins of life, to
be held at Princeton in May 1968, where Lovelock first met Lynn Margulis.^^
Lovelock found the reception of his ideas cool at the NASA meeting, with the
exception of the Swedish specialist in chemistry of the oceans Lars Gunnar
Sillen.23 He recalled that most of the older scientists at the meeting, especially
Preston Cloud, were unsympathetic to his concepts.^'* Nonetheless, he worked
steadily at the ideas, especially after 1970, when Lynn Margulis began to col-
laborate with him on the Gaia hypothesis. All the while, he continued as a con-
sultant at JPL, largely designing other scientists' instruments.

His and Horowitz's concerns notwithstanding, work on the latest versions
of Wolf Trap, Gulliver, and Oyama's experiment (now called the "gas exchange"
experiment, or GEx) all went ahead on continued NASA funding. So did the
development, by Klaus Biemann, Juan Oro, Leslie Orgel, and their team, of a
gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer to be sent to Mars to analyze organic
compounds present in the regolith. Lovelock came up with the crucial means
for hermetically linking the gas chromatograph to a mass spectrometer when
those instruments eventually were sent to Mars on the Viking spacecraft, the next
iteration of design after Congress finally definitively canceled Voyager in the
wake of the summer 1967 race riots in many U.S. eastern cities.

Lovelock called the new field spawned by the Gaia hypothesis "geo-
physiology." He later described its origins thus:

It arose during attempts to design experiments to detect life on other
planets, particularly Mars. For the most part these experiments were
geocentric and based on the notion of landing an automated biological
or biochemical laboratory on the planet. . . . Lovelock took the oppos-
ing view that not only were such experiments likely to fail because of
their egocentricity, but also that there was a more certain way of de-
tecting planetary life, whatever its form might be. This alternative ap-
proach to life detection came from a systems view of planetary life. In
particular, it suggests that if life can be taken to constitute a global en-
tity, its presence would be revealed by a change in the chemical com-
position of the planet's atmosphere. . . . The reasoning behind this idea
was that the planetary biota would be obliged to use any mobile me-
dium available to them as a source of essential nutrients and as a sink
for the disposal of the products of their metabolism. Such activity would
render a planet with life as recognizably different from a lifeless one.
At that time there was a fairly detailed compositional analysis by infra-
red astronomy of the Mars and Venus atmospheres, and it revealed both
planets to have atmospheres not far from chemical equilibrium. There-
fore, they were probably lifeless. -^^

Because of the state of chemical equilibrium in the atmospheres of both

Vikingi' to Mars 85

Venus and Mars, Lovelock predicted from the first Gaia insight in 1965 that
both planets were lifeless. Consequently, he was skeptical about the large ex-
penditures on the Viking biology instruments, above and beyond his earlier skep-
ticism about the conceptual basis of the instruments, now thinking the money
could be much better spent on other measurements on Mars.

Yet now an additional, much deeper insight dawned upon Lovelock. Given
the so-called faint young sun paradox, the fact that the biota was so actively
shaping the chemical environment of the biosphere (including the atmosphere)
took on new explanatory power The sun had been cooler, as much as 30 per-
cent cooler, at the time when life first originated on Earth. Yet during the entire
3.5 billion years or so since life had appeared, it seemed clear that the Earth's
surface temperature could not have varied by nearly as much as 30 percent from
present values: living things could not have survived and proliferated if the Earth
had been that much cooler than at present. Either the Earth had been warmer
than it should have been at the origin of life, relative to now, or, more likely,
living things were regulating the temperature, so that modem temperatures were
cooler, relative to how much the sun had warmed, than they would be on a life-
less planet. Because the main means of regulating the Earth's surface tempera-
ture known at the time was the so-called greenhouse effect, dependent upon gases
given oif and consumed by living organisms (CO2, methane, water vapor, among
others), it did not seem impossible that the biota could regulate planetary tem-
perature, decreasing the greenhouse effect slowly over eons, to compensate for
the increasing heat of the sun. (Later, it turned out, the biota also regulates cloud
formation and thus dramatically alters the amount of incoming solar energy re-
flected back to space as another powerful way of regulating temperature.)^*

Perhaps, Lovelock began to think, the biota acted as a cybernetic system
that regulated temperature, pH, oxygen level, and other parameters in just such
a way as to maintain conditions on Earth suitable for the survival of life. As
mentioned earlier. Lovelock's idea was at first received quite coolly by the sci-
entific community, even at a 1968 NASA-sponsored origin of life meeting where
interdisciplinary thinking was the norm.^^

Although he was not a fan of the Gaia hypothesis, Norman Horowitz
agreed with a number of Lovelock's views. Lovelock shared Horowitz's feel-
ing that sterilizing Martian landers was unnecessary: "The concept of contami-
nating a virginal Mars with Earth-life seemed the stuff of fanatics, not scientists,
and the act of sterilization hazarded the delicate and intricate instruments we
wanted to send to Mars."^^ In a more piquant passage. Lovelock described his
view of life detection experiments as follows:

the engineering and physical sciences of the NASA institutions was of-
ten so competent as to achieve an exquisite beauty of its own. By con-
trast with some very notable exceptions, the quality of the life sciences
was primitive and steeped in ignorance. It was almost as if a group of
the finest engineers were asked to design an automatic roving vehicle

86 The Living Universe

which could cross the Sahara Desert. When they had done this, they
were then required to design an automatic fishing rod and line to mount
on the vehicle to catch the fish that swam among the sand dunes. These
patient engineers were also expected to design their vehicle so as to
withstand the temperatures needed to sterilize it for otherwise the dunes
might be infected with fish-destroying microorganisms.^^

Yet Horowitz also felt that the Wolf Trap, Gulliver, and other designs
shared the basic flaw of assuming that Martian microbes, if they did exist, would
do well in a wet environment, since all those designs involved saturating Mar-
tian regolith with a liquid broth of nutrients. In Horowitz's way of thinking this
produced conditions wildly unlike those of Mars; he thought so still more after
July 1965, when the Mariner 4 space probe showed Mars to be a cratered, dry
planet. (Even President Lyndon Johnson, after looking at the Mariner 4 photos,
concluded that "life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many
have thought."^° Mariner 4 led Carl Sagan, in his enthusiasm for the possibility
of life, to observe that satellite photographs taken from six thousand miles above
Earth also showed no signs of life.)^' Measurements the spacecraft made of the
Martian atmosphere found it to be much thinner than previously supposed. The
pressure of the air was too low for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface.
"CO2 was its major component, with only a trace of water vapor," recalled
Horowitz. "That discovery gave me and my collaborators, George Hobby and
Jerry Hubbard, the impetus to design an instrument that would search for life
on a dry planet. That instrument was the pyrolytic release experiment. ... I
never applied [to NASA] for funding to develop the experiment, since the funds
were provided by JPL."^^

Because of the Mariner 4 results, Horowitz was among those who pro-
posed that Antarctica, specifically the very coldest, driest desert valleys there,
was a better analog for Mars than most other sites on Earth, yet even they, he
said, were overwhelmingly hospitable places for life compared to the Martian
environment.^^ Horowitz and his collaborators, Roy Cameron and Jerry Hubbard,
began to study the microbiology of the driest, most inhospitable parts of Ant-
arctica to understand whether life could survive there at all.^'' They later claimed
to have found some of the only naturally sterile soils on Earth (14 percent of
their samples) from these valleys, claiming this made life on Mars still less prob-
able than previously thought and proving that sterilizing spacecraft to be sent
to Mars was pointless because conditions there were so much harsher than those
sufficient to render some Antarctic soils totally sterile.^^ Cameron and Richard
Davies also launched a similar expedition in 1966 to the Atacama Desert of
northern Chile. ^*

In response to these findings both Levin and Vishniac began to test their
own life detection devices on the soils from the Antarctic Dry Valleys. In 1972
Vishniac's Wolf Trap was able to detect organisms in some of the samples that
Horowitz, Cameron, and Hubbard had found sterile, rendering a more optimis-

Vikings to Mars 87

tic view of the possibility of life on Mars.^^ His studies of the microbiology of
these valleys was to make Vishniac the first fatality in the field of exobiology,
when he slipped and fell to his death from an Antarctic cliff on a sampling ex-
pedition in December 1973.

In general, the preparations for Viking gave a big boost to research on mi-
crobial life in extreme environments. Thomas Brock, the expert in thermophilic
microorganisms, for example, was invited back to Ames: "In the early 1970s, I
was invited to Langley Field for a large NASA meeting, which was focused on
the Viking project. My talk was focused on life in extreme environments and
basically dealt with the question of what were the environmental requirements
for life. Carl Sagan seemed to be running this meeting."^^ Sagan and others were
prompted to try to define living systems more than ever, not merely as a theo-
retical matter for origin of life studies; now the need was great to define what
one should look for, what would count as life. From the Viking era date Sagan's
jocular speculations about the possibility of finding "squamous purple ovoids"
or "macrobes," large, visible life forms that justified the need for a television
camera to be mounted on Viking as one "life detection experiment. "^^ He gave
a more sober assessment in the article on the subject "Life" which he wrote for
the 1974 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.^^

In a discussion of the search for life on Mars soon after the Mariner 4
results, Horowitz spoke of life's extreme adaptability, even to harsh desert condi-
tions. He described in some detail, for example, the remarkable water-conserving
adaptations of the kangaroo rat of the Arizona/California Mojave Desert. But
he concluded on a more skeptical note, "even Southern California is not as dry
as Mars, and I am not suggesting that Mars is inhabited by kangaroo rats and
that the first life-detection device on Mars should be a mousetrap.'""

All this is not to say that Horowitz thought life on Mars impossible. Ameri-
can culture was influenced strongly in a similar direction by Frank Herbert's
science fiction novel Dune. Released in mass paperback just at the time of the
Mariner 4 results from Mars and positing an entire complex culture exquisitely
adapted to the conditions of a desert planet, the book went on to become far
more than a cult classic. (Herbert has also been credited with inspiring the na-
scent environmental movement; he constructed an entire ecology from Immense
sandworms to microscopic organisms crucial to the desert ecosystem's stability
and to the plot.)'^^ Summarizing his own thinking in a paper in Science, Horowitz
wrote that the Mariner 4 data were "very depressing news for biologists, but if
I have learned anything during 6 years of association with the space program,
it is that people with manic depressive tendencies should stay out of it. . . . The
fact is that nothing we have learned about Mars — in contrast to Venus — excludes
it as a possible abode of life.'"'^ Although he concluded, "it is certainly true that
no terrestrial species could survive under average Martian conditions as we know
them, except in a dormant state," Horowitz nonetheless kept open the possibil-
ity. He reasoned (and the later discovery of dry water channels from a time of
flooding in Mars's distant past confirm his thinking): "But if we admit the

88 The Living Universe

possibility that Mars once had a more favorable climate which was gradually
transformed to the severe one we find there today, and if we accept the possi-
bility that life arose on the planet during this earlier epoch, then we cannot ex-
clude the possibility that Martian life succeeded in adapting itself to the changing
conditions and survives there still.""^

Horowitz was highly skeptical but not so much that it prevented him from
accepting the logical possibilities of the problem. "It is not optimism about the
outcome that gives impetus to the search for extraterrestrial life," he said; "rather,
it is the immense importance that a positive result would have." When one mul-
tiplied the probability of success by the importance of the problem, he concluded,
"the value so obtained is high." Mariner 4 did not conclusively answer the ques-
tion, Horowitz argued, but it did prove that we now had, or very soon would
have, the technology capable of doing so."*^

In the same paper in February 1 966 Horowitz described the current state
of the Gulliver experiment (fig. 4.2), after he had been on board as scientific
advisor to Gilbert Levin for three and a half years.'** Urey-Miller type chemis-
try led to the assumption that some organic products would be common through-
out the solar system, and these compounds were the ones that should be selected
for the radioactively labeled substrates in the nutrient broth. Formate, lactate,
and glutamate were good choices on these grounds and were readily metabo-
lized to CO2, he said. (Apparently, none of the biologists designing or review-
ing the experiment were aware or remembered that formate was capable of
reacting in a purely chemical way, with peroxides for instance, to produce CO2
as well.)

Yet ever since the Mariner 4 results, as mentioned earlier, Horowitz de-
creased and soon dropped his involvement with Gulliver (soon to be renamed
the Labeled Release, or LR, experiment) and began working on a life detection
device that would not require organisms to grow in liquid water. This was the
beginning of what came to be known as the Pyrolytic Release, or PR, experi-
ment, one of those actually chosen in 1 969 to fly to Mars on Viking. "In a way,
it was Levin's machine turned upside down."'*^ Horowitz discussed the concept
briefly in the February 1966 Science paper: one could use radioactively labeled
carbon dioxide to test for photosynthesis in a sample of Martian regolith be-
cause, "if there is life on the planet there must be at least one photosynthetic
species."'*^ Regardless of whether water or some other substance was used by
organisms as the reducing agent, the carbon fixed would thus show up as ra-
dioactively labeled organic compounds. This could be volatilized by heating (py-
rolyzing) the organic matter in an oven after a suitable incubation time and after
first flushing all of the original labeled CO2 from the system. Then the organic
carbon would be converted back to labeled CO2 and could be measured by a
Geiger counter, just as in the LR experiment. As he noted, Horowitz got all his
funding for the PR device through JPL; he never needed to apply for money
from the Washington headquarters Exobiology Program as Vishniac and Levin
did.

Viking5 to Mars 89

Figure 4.2. Gilbert Levin field testing the "Gulliver" Mars life detection device (later
called the Labeled Release, or LR, experiment) in the California desert, summer 1965.
(Courtesy G. Levin.)

Building and Launching Viking

By 1968 the canceled Voyager had been replaced by the planned Viking
Mars mission, and NASA advertised a competition among all submitted life de-
tection schemes, to decide which four experiments would be chosen to get built
and sent to the Martian surface on the Viking lander. In December 1969, from
over fifty submissions, the four experiments chosen were Horowitz's PR, Levin's

90 The Living Universe

LR, Oyama's GEx, and Vishniac's Wolf Trap."*' A planning committee was cre-
ated to oversee design and construction of the Biology Instrument package; the
contractor, TRW of Redondo Beach, California, had the lowest bid and got the
contract to build it. The committee consisted of the four experimenters, with
Wolf Vishniac as the initial chair, plus Joshua Lederberg and Alex Rich, scien-
tists who it was felt could be more objective since they did not have experi-
ments of their own at stake. Vishniac, it soon turned out, was too laid-back and
willing to allow everybody their say; with the mix of strong egos on the com-
mittee nothing would get decided, and things did not move forward. Each ex-
perimenter thought his own approach by far the most important, yet all the
experiments had to function in a common environment inside the same experi-
ment package (see fig. 4.1). As just one example, Horowitz argued that the tem-
perature inside the package should be kept as low as possible. Having designed
a dry experiment, he had no qualms about making uncomfortable those who
insisted on such non-Mars-like wet experiments, as he told Lederberg: "There
is to be an important meeting at TRW this Friday to make decisions regarding
the thermal environment of the biology package. I intend to press for as low a
temperature as possible — 0°C rather than the 15°C agreed on before the deci-
sion was made to land mission B at a high latitude. I would be glad to go even
lower if I thought there was a chance it would be acceptable to the wet experi-
menters. I hope I will have your support if it should turn out to be necessary to
poll the team."^"

Data from Mariners 6, 7, and 9 in the years since 1965 had confirmed
that Mars had a thin atmosphere and was a cold, rocky, desert planet. Mariner
9 in 1971 had arrived in the middle of a planet- wide dust storm with greater
than 100 mph winds that lasted for months. Moving piles of dust, sorted by grain
size and thus having different shades of gray, now appeared ever more certain
to be the explanation of the changing colored surface features that had tempted
observers since Percival Lowell to imagine vegetation zones shifting with the
seasons.

Before long Harold "Chuck" Klein was invited to join the committee as
the new chair. He brought the same capable administrative talents that he had
brought to directing the Ames Exobiology Program and then all of Life Sci-
ences at Ames. Klein's managerial style worked, and though the Viking Biol-
ogy Committee was noted by many as one of the most contentious groups of
people ever assigned to work jointly, he managed to keep the group together
and the project moving forward, if notoriously behind schedule. Said Klein, "I
think NASA was really looking for a 'moderator' — not necessarily a 'leader' —
and I suppose they came to me because I ostensibly had a reputation for being
pragmatic, able to deal with people, and experienced at formulating compro-
mise solutions in difficult situations. (I had the nickname, 'Rabbi,' among some
of my associates.)"^' Klein's level-headed calm would turn out to be most im-
portant of all in the days and weeks after Viking landed on Mars and after re-
sults from the experiments began to come in. Oversight by Gerald Soffen at JPL

Vikingi' to Mars 91

Figure 4.3. "On Mars": posing beside a full-scale replica of the Viking lander at Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Biochemist Leslie Orgel (far right), with his
wife, Alice, and son, and Gerald Soffen, senior Viking Project scientist, c. 1975.
(Courtesy L. Orgel.)

(fig. 4.3), Klein's superior as overall director of all twenty-seven Viking science
experiments, was equally important.

Another Viking experiment crucial to exobiology was being designed by
Klaus Biemann of MIT, the world's most renowned specialist in mass spectrom-
etry; he had been working with Mars in mind since the 1964-1965 NAS Mars
meetings. -^^ Now he headed a team including Salk Institute biochemist Leslie
Orgel (fig. 4.3) and John Oro of the University of Houston, specialist in (and
founder of) the new field of organic cosmochemistry. They were attempting to
build a miniaturized gas chromatograph (GC), mated to a mass spectrometer
(MS), such that organic compounds separated by GC could then be fed one by
one into the attached MS, where they could be identified by molecular weight.
In the words of its designers, finding the structures and abundances of organic
molecules on the Martian surface

seemed important because we hoped that the nature of Martian organic
molecules would provide a sensitive indicator of the chemical and physi-
cal environment in which they were formed. Furthermore, we hoped

92 The Living Universe

that the details of their structures would indicate which of many pos-
sible biotic and abiotic syntheses are occurring on Mars. . . .

Since much is known about the degradation of organic compounds
under the influence of high temperature, pressure, irradiation, etc., the
absence of organic compounds above a certain limit of detection might
eliminate certain sets of conditions that otherwise could be postulated
to exist or to have existed at the surface.'^

It was thought by many, including Horowitz, that the GC-MS data would
be the most useful of all in telling something about the possibility for life on
Mars. It could report on the identity and quantity of organic molecules necessary
to build living cells (or possibly left over from no longer living cells). Thus, it
did not depend upon the chance of encountering still-living cells to give infor-
mation relevant to past or present life; even if the biology experiments all yielded
negative results, finding organics relevant to life would still be highly sugges-
tive. At the very least even if life had never evolved on Mars, many thought
that prebiotic organic molecules must surely have formed there, Miller-Urey
style. If prebiotic chemistry on Mars had been frozen by changes in the planet's
climate and atmosphere in an intermediate stage before life emerged, to many
exobiologists a survey of those compounds seemed just as great a scientific trea-
sure trove as finding extant life: it was like having a snapshot of the develop-
ment of a terrestrial planet in an earlier stage, perhaps similar to what Earth had
passed through.

As development of the Viking instruments progressed, Horowitz and his
team discovered that Miller-Urey synthesis on Mars was more than just a theo-
retical matter. In test runs of their pyrolytic release (PR) device they exposed
simple inorganic gases in a simulated Martian atmosphere to light from a xe-
non arc lamp and found that Miller-Urey type organic compounds were being
synthesized.''' They determined that it was the ultraviolet wavelengths that were
catalyzing the synthesis from carbon monoxide as carbon source. Because this
process of carbon fixation would mimic the living response that the PR instru-
ment was designed to detect, they had to shield the lamp with an ultraviolet fil-
ter in their design, lest the experiment give a false positive. In June 1972 the
group had found that a similar reaction could occur with methane as the carbon
source; as Horowitz described it to Miller: "Ellis Golub, a post-doc who is work-
ing with Hubbard at JPL, finds that methane is converted to organics (formal-
dehyde?) when it is irradiated with long-wavelength UV (longer than 2500A)
in the presence of Vycor. The identification of HCHO is not certain yet, and I
am hoping he will finish that before he leaves in July. . . . The reaction is dif-
ferent in some ways from that involving CO, as might be expected, since one is
an oxidation and the other a reduction. There are still plenty of mysteries left."''

Thus, as the mission approached, Horowitz opined that the GCMS experi-
ment would probably be of even greater importance than the biology package,
which was constantly plagued with delays. As he expressed it to Leslie Orgel

Vikings to Mars 93

of the GCMS team: "The Viking biology package is experiencing severe diffi-
culties, as you have probably heard. I am happy to hear that GCMS is in good
shape, however. I consider it the most important instrument on Viking. "^^

Indeed, problems with the biology instrument were not limited merely to
the difficulties of getting the team to work together. Fearing the complexities
of getting all four experiments to function problem-free in a single instrument,
NASA's Viking Project manager James Martin issued a directive on 1 July 1971
declaring: "It is project policy that no single malfunction shall cause the loss of
data return from more than one scientific investigation."^'' In November and
December 1971 TRW and NASA Ames personnel under Chuck Klein worked
to simplify the biology instrument. It simply had too much going on in the space
allotted. In 0.027 cubic meters — a box about the size of a gallon milk carton —
were 40,000 parts, half of them transistors.^^ Several items were eliminated, in-
cluding a Martian gas pump, an onboard carbon dioxide gas system, and one
control chamber each for the GEx (Oyama's) and light scattering (Wolf Trap)
experiments.^' By 24-25 January 1972 Walt Jakobowski and Richard Young
from NASA headquarters met with people from the Viking Project Office, Martin
Marietta Corporation, and TRW "to discuss ways to remedy the problems, es-
pecially cost, which had escalated to $33 million."^" Alas, by the end of the
month James Martin had concluded that one of the four biology experiments
would have to go. Klein, Lederberg, and Rich, the Biology Team members who
did not have a stake in any one of the experiments, met to discuss priorities;
shortly afterward, by 13 March 1972, NASA headquarters had decided that
Vishniac's light-scattering experiment was based on the least Mars-like con-
ditions and therefore it should be the one to be sacrificed. The lot fell to ad-
ministrator John Naugle to convey the bad news to Vishniac.^' The entire Viking
Biology Team met immediately and showed rare cohesiveness in criticizing the
decision at headquarters to drop the Wolf Trap. "Young & Soffen were on the
hot seat" to defend the priorities of headquarters. "While stopping short of mu-
tiny— and still promising to work hard — Klein said that the team wanted a bet-
ter explanation of why Wolf Trap was dropped."^^

Vishniac was, as one might expect, the most upset of all. But all protests
were in vain; the decision of headquarters was final. This put Vishniac in an
almost untenable position with regard to funding, bringing the full brunt of
"NASA envy" upon him in his exposed and vulnerable position.^^ Vishniac man-
aged to continue his studies on microorganisms in Antarctica; he also began col-
lecting samples for another microbiologist, E. Imre Friedmann, who specialized
in endolithic microbes (those that live entirely within rocks) and sought them
in Antarctic rocks, postulating that they might be analogs of Martian organisms.*^
But for Vishniac that, too, came to an end with his accidental death when he
fell from a cliff there while collecting samples, on 10 December 1973.^^

Was the headquarters decision justified? In retrospect the Viking Biology
package costs continued to escalate; even without inclusion of the Vishniac ex-
periment the total came in at $59 million, surely one of the most expensive space

94 The Living Universe

experiments by far and one of the big high-budget space missions that triggered,
in response, the "faster, better, cheaper" approach that Dan Goldin later brought
as NASA administrator. The Biology Team members felt this would have hap-
pened anyway, even with all four original experiments still included; in hind-
sight, however, it is hard to believe that at least some reduction in cost overruns
was not achieved by the tough decision.

It should be noted that the relevance of Antarctic ecosystems as models
for exobiology research remained very much alive after Vishniac's death and is
seen by many as one of his legacies to the field. E. Imre Friedmann has been a
leader in this field and started an entire research group at Florida State Univer-
sity to investigate the endolithic microorganisms. His work was funded by NASA
Exobiology:

My first NASA grant started in 1977 and since then I have been sup-
ported without interruption, I remember how difficult it was at the first
time to find the proper channel where to apply. As a recent immigrant
to the US I was relatively inexperienced in these matters and I found
the vast organization that is NASA frighteningly complex and impen-
etrable (this was the time before the Intemet, where instant informa-
tion is at hand). It took me more than a year (after mailing an application
to the wrong address and waiting for an answer, while missing the dead-
line) until I found the Exobiology program and Dick Young, who was
very helpful from the beginning.**

Michael Meyer, who later became the head of the NASA Exobiology (now
Planetary Biology) Program upon John Rummel's departure in 1992, was a
postdoc in Friedmann's lab beginning in 1985, after he had completed his Ph.D.
degree on cryopreservafion of marine diatoms. Friedmann ran two important
workshops on the relevance of cryptoendolithic organisms to the biological evo-
lufion of Mars, on 11-13 October 1985 and on 26-28 October 1990. Chris
McKay contributed a paper to Friedmann's monumental 1993 Antarctic Micro-
biology volume in which he argues for the continued relevance of Antarcfic eco-
systems, not only for Mars but for exobiology research on Europa and other
locales as well.*^ Friedmann remained active in Antarctic research, funded by
both NASA and NSF, until 1997 near his retirement, when bureaucratic red tape
at NSF made getting continued funding from that agency too difficult.*^

X>y the time the Viking 1 and 2 spacecraft launched from Cape Kennedy,
on 20 August and 9 September 1975, respectively, the team had written a de-
scription of the experiments for Nature.^'^ A special issue of the journal Origins
of Life was also in preparation, describing the experiments in much greater de-
tail. A feeling comes through from those involved of a sense of the historic na-
ture of their enterprise, but they were also aware of how complex the experiments
were and how limited was their ability from Earth to check up on ambiguous
results or run additional controls. Richard Young wrote a history of the mission

Vikingi to Mars 95

to date.^o Harold Klein penned an overview of the biology package and its de-
velopment.^' Knowing the sensational nature of the mission, Klein seemed to
feel more than most the responsibility to educate the press and the public about
keeping a cautious, scientific attitude toward the experiments. The special issue
of Origins of Life also contained detailed descriptions of each of the three re-
maining biology experiments, authored by members of each team. Levin's
coauthor was his chief co-experimenter on the LR, Patricia Straat.''^ Jerry
Hubbard wrote for the Horowitz PR team.''^ And Oyama, Bonnie Berdahl, and
the rest of the team described the GEx experiment.^'' This set a pattern that was
repeated in special Viking experiment issues of several journals at different phases
of the data collection, interpretation, and disputation of the results: Klein would
write a general overview, expressing a broad consensus of the outcome, then
each of the experiment teams would write up separately their individual results
and opinions. ^^

The Bicentennial Anticlimax: What Viking Found and
What It Did Not Find

Viking 1 landed in a basin, the plain of Chryse, on 20 July 1976, seven
years to the day after Apollo 11 had landed on the Moon. (Initially, a 4 July
landing to celebrate the U.S. Bicentennial had been hoped for; in the end calm
heads prevailed, as extra time was needed to assess the safety of the possible
landing sites more carefully. Too rocky a site might cause the descending lander
to tip over upon touchdown.) Viking 2 landed a few weeks later, 3 September
1976, on the plain of Utopia, halfway around the planet and considerably closer
to the North Polar cap, in an area that had the highest measured levels of atmo-
spheric water vapor. After a short time of stabilizing systems, Yiking 1 began to
transmit a television image of the Martian surface, and on 28 July a mechanical
arm with a scoop dug a trench about five centimeters deep in the Martian re-
golith and delivered samples to the hoppers from which the biology instruments
and the GCMS drew. When the first television images came in, "a new reality
was created." Science experiments manager Gerald Soffen said: "Mars had be-
come a place. It went from a word, an abstract thought, to a real place."''^ No
longer the stuff of fantasy novels, open to the full span of what different people's
imaginations could envision, now there was a real landscape to engage with men-
tally. Little did any of the researchers yet suspect how multifaceted, even enig-
matic, this new place with the pink sky and dusty, rocky red landscape could
prove to be.

First, the inorganic analysis team led by Benton Clark of Martin Marietta
Corporation, using an x-ray fluorescence spectrometer, discovered remarkably
high levels of sulfur, in the form of inorganic sulfate, in the Martian regolith.
Phosphorus was also thought to be present (it is found in the Martian atmo-
sphere).^^ Next, when the scoop delivered the sample to the GCMS, the indica-
tor said the hopper was still empty — that is, that no sample had been delivered.

96 The Living Universe

Eventually, it was thought that most likely the indicator was malfunctioning,
but the glitch introduced a cloud of uncertainty into interpreting the GCMS re-
sults when they finally began to come in. The biology experiments, meanwhile,
had plenty of surprises of their own to offer.

Every one of the biology experiments yielded evidence of activity from
the very first run. The pyrolytic release experiment gave one reading consistent
with production of organic matter (e.g., by photosynthesis), and the reading was
high enough compared to his prestated requirements that even Horowitz was
briefly shaken about his doubts over the existence of life on Mars. But this re-
sult was not repeatable. When wetted in the gas exchange experiment, the "soil"
(regolith) released oxygen "in amounts ranging from 70 to 770 moles per cubic
cm. Heating the sample to 145°C for 3.5 hours reduced the amount of O2 re-
leased by about 50%. There was a slow evolution of CO2 when nutrient was
added to the soil."''^ By three days into the first run (1 August 1976) the gas
production had decreased considerably, leading some to suspect that the reac-
tion was chemical rather than biological. That is, it may have been produced by
a potent reactant present in the sample which was used up via chemical combi-
nation with the water or nutrients.^'^

Levin's Labeled Release experiment showed the most potent reaction of
all three. Recall that the nutrient solution added to the sample contained a mixture
of "the following acids: formic, glycine, glycolic, D-lactic, L-lactic, D-alanine
and L-alanine, each . . . uniformly labeled with 14C. The volume of nutrient de-
livered to the sample contains approximately 260,000 cpm, each of the 17 car-
bons of the added substrates thus contributing about 15,000 cpm."^" There was
an immediate peak of labeled CO2 release in the first minutes after the nutrient
solution was added, followed by a slow, continued release over the many days
during which measurements continued. The amount of CO2 released amounted
to approximately 15,000 cpm, or the amount as if a single carbon atom had been
cleaved at the same spot from the entire pool of a single substrate.^' The plot of
data looked somewhat like a bacterial growth curve (though it lacked an initial
lag phase); furthermore, if the soil was first heated to 160°C for three hours the
activity was completely destroyed.**^ The effect was partially destroyed by in-
cubating the soil at 40-60°C, and the activity was "relatively stable for short
periods at 18°C," but lost after long term storage at 18°C. All of these data
seemed to Levin to be almost completely consistent with what one would expect
from a biological reaction. He was tentative at first, but the subsequent controls
convinced him that the best explanation of the LR results could well be the ex-
istence of microbial life on Mars.^^

Horowitz was as puzzled as any by the results but determined not to aban-
don his earlier caution. Given that results were being released to the press on
practically a daily basis, the nation, indeed the world, was getting the chance to
observe science in process in a new way. Viking officials, especially Klein,
worked hard to explain the slow, deliberate process by which the experiments

Vikings to Mars 97

had to be checked, different kinds of controls tried, and so forth. But the results
were simply too unexpected; at each new trial that should have brought clarity
in choosing between a chemical or biological explanation of the results, the am-
biguity stubbornly persisted. Unused to doing science with an audience looking
in at every step in the process, on 7 August Horowitz told the press: "We hope
by the end of this mission to have excluded all but one of the explanations,
whichever way that may be. I want to emphasize that if this were normal science,
we wouldn't even be here [i.e., at a press conference] — we'd be working in our
laboratories for three more months — you wouldn't even know what was going
on and at the end of that time we would come out and tell you the answer. Hav-
ing to work in a fishbowl like this is an experience that none of us is used to."^'*

As many, including Horowitz, had thought, the GCMS results were be-
ginning to look as though they would be awfully useful in sorting out the am-
biguous results from the biology experiments. "As one observer noted, the gas
chromatograph-mass spectrometer was the court of appeals in the event that the
biological experiments did not present a clear verdict."^^ But perhaps the great-
est surprise of all came from the GCMS, once analysis had been run. The GCMS
team decided, given the need to clarify the confusion developing around the bi-
ology results, to gamble that the device actually had received a sample in the
first scoops (the remote control arm had jammed after that, so it was quite a
while before another sample might be delivered to the instrument); they ran the
first analysis on 6 August 1976, after heating the sample to only 200°C (which
was not expected to volatilize any organics if they were present). The instru-
ment worked well and behaved as though a sample had indeed been present.
So, a follow-up analysis was run on 12 August with the remainder of the sample
to look specifically at the organics. If life were responsible for the biology ex-
periment results, organics should certainly be present (though their presence did
not necessarily mean those results must be biological).

To Biemann's surprise and everyone else's there were no organic com-
pounds at all, down to the level of a few parts per billion that the instrument
could detect.^^ This was a great shock. Like most of the Viking scientists, Gerald
Soffen, "once he assimilated the fact that the GCMS had found no organic ma-
terials, walked away from where the data were being analyzed"; all he could
think was: "That's the ball game. No organics on Mars, no life on Mars." Soffen
"confessed that it took him some time to believe the results were conclusive.
At first, he argued . . . that there must have been no sample present in the GCMS
because there had to be organics of some sort on the planet. ... To his dismay,
the data [from the second sample] indicated that there was a sample in the in-
strument and that the sample was devoid of organics. "^^ On subsequent repeat
runs the results were the same.

Later investigators, like those present at JPL in August and September 1976
(with the noteworthy exception of Gilbert Levin), have been forced to conclude
that "since the infall of meteorites and interplanetary dust should be carrying

98 The Living Universe

organics to Mars at a rate of over 100,000 kg per year, the absence of organics
suggests that they are being actively destroyed. The destruction . . . could be
due solely to . . . solar UV."^^

Juan Oro of the molecular analysis team called an ad hoc meeting of Viking
scientists: he had a theory about the source of gas production in the biology
experiments. Oro recalled from some of his earlier biochemical work that for-
mate, one of the carbon sources in the LR nutrient mixture, could, in the pres-
ence of a catalyst, be easily cleaved by hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) or other
peroxides to form CO2 and water. Oro thought the iron oxides on the Martian
surface could be excellent catalysts and that the peroxides would be formed by
photolytic chemistry in the atmosphere and on the surface of Mars because of
the high levels of solar UV.^' Thus, the same UV exposure might explain both
the lack of organics in the top five cm of the "soil" and the sudden, rapid CO2
production when a sample of the surface material, containing UV-produced per-
oxides, was first brought in contact with the LR nutrient solution. The rapid pro-
duction of oxygen gas in the GEx experiment when the soil was first wetted, he
thought, might be from the same peroxides splitting the water to release oxy-
gen gas.

According to Levin, Oro was highly concerned with receiving priority for
this idea and made any scientist who stayed to hear his theory sign a paper say-
ing he would not publish on it before Oro did. Levin thought this attitude sus-
pect.'" Shortly afterward, in a press conference in which the GCMS results were
announced, Klein also told the press about Oro's new theory. In Oro's account,
"Chuck Klein was very correct in saying, now, you're going to be presented
with observations that according to Levin indicate the possibility of life on Mars.
But one member of the molecular analysis team has a relatively simple chemi-
cal explanation, so the press was divided in two groups [of opinion]. And the
basic theory was published the next day in the Los Angeles Times.'"^^

Oro and many others carried out simulations of the effect of UV on or-
ganics: "the ultraviolet light gets to the surface, producing H2O2 and oxidizing
any organic compounds. We did some experiments in the laboratory simulating
Martian conditions and the half-life of any organic compound is at most two
months."'^ Cyril Ponnamperuma and a team at the University of Maryland added
peroxide to a sample of Levin's nutrient mixture, which Klein sent them; they
found a very similar response and amount of CO2 evolution to what was seen
in the Mars LR experiment.'^ Oyama and several of his coworkers eagerly em-
braced the chemical oxidation theory as the most likely explanation of their GEx
results. They proposed, after some lab work, that 1^e203 was the most likely
oxidant.'"*

Levin thought everybody jumping on the peroxide/chemical explanation
bandwagon was being just as nonobjective as if one staunchly insisted on a bio-
logical explanation. He pointed out that the control run of the LR, on a sample
heated to 160°C, had completely killed the response; why should peroxides act
that way? he asked. Proponents of the chemical theory replied that 160°C might

Vikings to Mars 99

have been enough to destroy a peroxide. Levin recalls that he collected the six
Biology Team members as well as Leslie Orgel and asked them to write on a
slip of paper a temperature they would agree would clearly differentiate between
a chemical and a biological reaction. There was remarkable unanimity among
the seven independent "secret ballots": they all picked 50°C. That is, a reaction
that was active below 50°C but ceased fairly sharply at that temperature was
probably biological, they thought. Levin asked Fred Brown, the LR instrument
contractor, whether he could program the LR device aboard Viking so that it
would heat a sample to only 50°C rather than to 160°C. Brown was able to run
the LR at Src using only some of the heaters, and the activity was almost to-
tally eliminated.'^

As a control. Levin suggested trying the 50°C heating again. The second
time the instrument ran at 46°C. The response was a 70 percent reduction in
the reaction. This was extremely suggestive to Levin, whose research experi-
ence with distinguishing fecal coliforms bacteria from other coliforms had im-
pressed upon him that a fairly small temperature difference, from 37 to 44°C,
was enough to completely suppress the growth, of all but fecal organisms. But
the results also seemed to be in striking accord with the prediction each of the
seven scientists had made. Levin pressed the other scientists to admit that a tem-
perature difference of 46 to 5rc could not possibly affect the chemical reac-
tion and must therefore be biological. But the six others immediately retracted
their commitment to the 50°C number. Levin says, and they insisted that it could
still be due to a chemical reaction.'^ Their caution may be partly ascribed to
the fact that they had only a single pair of data points, with replication difficult
or impossible to achieve on an instrument that was so far away.

The data were as confused and ambiguous as ever, having some "chemi-
cal" and some "biological" features. But with so much at stake — not only life
on Mars but the possibility of seeming impetuous, unscientific, or insufficiently
cautious before a world audience — the underlying bedrock epistemological as-
sumptions of the experimenters were thrown into sharp relief. This can be viewed
as a giant artifact caused by the abnormal fish bowl conditions under which the
science was being carried out, or, alternately, as a unique opportunity because
of the abnormal conditions (analogous to the fortuitous timing of the impact and
analysis of the Murchison meteorite) to obtain a window into parts of the pro-
cess of doing science which would normally be hidden from view. Perhaps in
the spirit of Schrodinger and Heisenberg, we must entertain both views simul-
taneously to gain a full picture of the nature of science, at least of exobiology.
Since the "big science" of the post-Second World War period, and particularly
in the case of exobiology, to speak of the science artificially extracted from the
public relations context that served as such nourishing soil for its development
would be arbitrary indeed.

Levin and Straat continued to make the case that the interpretation of the
biology results from Viking, at least the results from their LR experiment, were
still open. By 1979, however, almost all other scientists concluded that the

100 The Living Universe

chemical explanation was more likely.^'' In that context Levin and Straat were
viewed as being intransigent; they were rapidly marginalized. By 1988 they
wrote that the balance of the evidence now seemed to them to have tipped in
favor of a biological interpretation.^^ By the 1990s Straat was no longer writing
on the subject, but Levin became still more convinced after the 1997 Mars Path-
finder results that water might exist in significant quantities not far below the
surface of Mars; thus, life was more likely. Similarly, he considered that the
August 1996 announcement of the discovery of putative microfossils in a Mar-
tian meteorite gave broad support for the case for Martian biology, even if those
possible organisms were from over three billion years in the past.'^ Like Carl
Sagan, Levin raised the possibility that Earth biota could have been seeded by
Mars meteorites long ago when Mars was still habitable, or vice versa, now that
it was recognized that meteorites were in fact moving at least in the Mars to
Earth direction.'""

In 1997 a popular book appeared, championing Levin's cause and pre-
senting him as a scientific genius suppressed by the establishment."" Levin's
former Viking colleagues and the new generation of exobiology researchers had
largely ignored Levin's writings for the past fifteen years; however, the new book
by Barry DiGregorio caused Harold Klein sufficient irritation that he felt com-
pelled to respond, hoping to silence the argument once and for all.'°^

Klein pointed out that Levin's argument consisted of two main proposi-
tions; only one of them had been properly and direcdy addressed, he said. "The
two main arguments . . . are, first that the responses seen on Mars are virtually
indistinguishable from those shown by a variety of terrestrial organisms and sec-
ond, that laboratory attempts to reproduce the LR results, based on non-biological
mechanisms, cannot account for the results." '"^ Klein said all rebuttals had con-
centrated on the second argument, while littie attention had been paid to the first.
He went on to outline a number of characteristics that the presumed Martian
microbe or microbes must have, in order to fit with the data. First, they needed
to live in an anaerobic environment devoid of liquid water at temperatures av-
eraging (even at a sheltered depth of 5 cm below the surface) between -33 and
-73°C.

Second, the organisms must survive after being brought from that ambi-
ent environment and placed in a storage container at an average of 15 to 18 °C
within the Viking lander. The samples were held at that temperature for eight
days, at which time they were placed in an incubation chamber at 10 to 13°C.
Two days later, ten days after being scooped up and dumped into the space-
craft, the sample had 0.115 mL of an aqueous solution of the organic carbon
sources added. After being put through these changes, the microbial species (or
spp.) must immediately release gas (within the first four minutes, as the first
measurement showed substantial gas already released by that time, continuing
straight up to 1100 cpm released within the first hour); Klein emphasized that
the reaction took off immediately without the lag phase characteristic of most
microbial growth curves. Then it leveled off after about twenty-four hours and

Vikings to Mars 101

ceased when carbon "approximately equivalent to one of the added carbon at-
oms [was] released, and over 90% of the added nutrients remain[ed] unaf-
fected."'** Klein noted the further improbability for a living organism to have
done all of these things: next, when the sample was treated with a second dose
of nutrient solution, no further release of radioactive gas was seen.

Finally, while fully active after ten days of storage at 15°C, these organ-
isms must "lose their ability to metabolise when the nutrient mixture is [first]
added after 84 days of storage at this temperature." "^^ Klein argued, "it is pos-
sible that examples can be found in which a single species, or group of or-
ganisms, can duplicate one of these elements, and that another . . . group of
organisms can duplicate a different one. But the likelihood that any single spe-
cies, or group of terrestrial organisms, can reproduce the aggregate of observa-
tions made under conditions similar to those experienced during the Viking LR
experiments is infinitesimal. ... To claim that terrestrial organisms could re-
produce all aspects of the LR data, is unsubstantiated."'"*

Carl Sagan, in his mature reflections about Mars, was skeptical. But in
1993 he still held out the prospect for counterintuitive local variations, saying:

Within the emerging exobiology community [in the early 1960s] there
was, as there is today, a spectrum of beliefs about the likelihood of extra-
terrestrial life. There were those who, like Philip Abelson, for example,
argued that the environment of Mars, particularly the low water activ-
ity, was a demonstration that the planet is lifeless. And, of course, in
retrospect, you've got to doff your hat to Abelson. He was right. But
we argued that you could not be sure, that for the first time examining
a planet in which there had been at least smoke, if not fire, about extra-
terrestrial life, you had to be careful. Lederberg and 1 wrote a paper on
oases, that is, microenvironments, that conditions deviated from the
norm, and there certainly today seem to be such microenvironments [on
Mars]. So that's one area of debate. . . .

Some people thought life was more likely than other people thought,
but I think what bound us together was the importance of the question,
including the importance of negative answers.'"''

Not long after Klein's rebuttal, Levin and his case for a revised LR ex-
periment that would resolve the ambiguities of the Viking results received front-
page coverage in the Washington Post. While occasionally tongue-in-cheek, the
piece did give Levin a considerably more sympathetic forum than he had found
among the scientific community.'"^ The case for life on Mars perked up with a
prominent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which
argued that the Viking GCMS would have been unable to detect some of the
most likely organic compounds delivered to the Martian surface by meteorites. '^^
In retrospect some have argued that the GCMS was too insensitive to detect
organic matter in amounts found in the number of cells suggested by Levin's
interpretation of the LR data; it had been assumed in the instrument's design

102 The Living Universe

that, if cells were able to grow, higher levels of organics must be present all
around them. Further discoveries of subsurface water ice by Mars Odyssey in
February and March 2002 have continued to reveal, much like the observations
of Mariner 4 did in 1965, that Mars is a sufficiently complex place to repeat-
edly overturn past scientific certainties. Levin has been vindicated on a number
of points. (The case of the meteorite ALH 84001, discussed in chap. 8, illustrates
this point further.) We still have a very small set of locations from which sur-
face samples have been taken and samples only to a depth of five centimeters.
Perhaps at a depth of a meter, ten meters, or more sufficient shielding from UV
and sufficient frozen water, possibly even liquid water, are available to make
organic compounds viable. Perhaps even life. Some might argue that the stun-
ning discoveries at hydrothermal vents, of the "third kingdom" of Archaea (see
chap. 5), or of the endosymbiotic behavior of bacteria that later turned into mi-
tochondria, chloroplasts, and other cell organelles should make researchers more
cautious than Klein in predicting what microbes might and might not be capable
of. At bottom this turns upon a basic attitude toward the degree of adaptability
of living organisms; what is more unlikely, life on a harsh planet such as Mars
or Europa or life (even complex multicellular animals) at many atmospheres of
pressure and temperatures approaching 150 to 200°C near undersea hydrother-
mal vents? (In such a situation the "micro environment oases" invoked for Mars
in 1962 by Sagan and Lederberg are also extremely relevant.) Those on differ-
ent sides of that divide will tend to disagree about the meaning of a great many
kinds of evidence. They will conduct different, often complementary kinds of
research.

Levin argues that even Lovelock's test for life on Mars has been met be-
cause of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Since the proposed
oxidants have never been conclusively proven to exist. Levin argues, living or-
ganisms are the likely source that recycles CO into CO2.

Carl Sagan died in December 1996, Gerald Soffen in November 2000, and
Harold Klein in July 2001; they will not see the outcome of the story. Perhaps
Levin could yet get his follow-up LR experiment on a future Mars mission, as
he hopes. A planned automated sample return mission in the decade after 2010
could answer many questions as well. Mars can wait, it seems. After showing
up human intellectual foibles for well over a century now. Mars has all the time
in the world.

Part III

broadened horizons,
1976-2000

Chapter 5

Tide ^ost-V'^n^ ^T^volutions

Ihe. years from 1976 to the 1990s were a
time of even greater ferment in exobiology than the 1950s to 1975. Several new
seriously stultifying factors to origin of life research appeared, about which con-
sensus emerged almost simultaneously around 1980. In the wake of Viking and
these new realizations, massive reconceptualization was required. This was true
for the origin of life problem itself and for almost all that was known about con-
ditions on the primitive Earth. Iris Fry has described how Creationists jumped
on the new quandaries and reconceptualizations to claim that origin of life work
had reached a "crisis" that science cannot resolve: "They also revel in data indi-
cating that the time available for the emergence of the first living systems was
much shorter than previously thought. The natural emergence of complex bio-
logical organization already evident in the simplest cell, they claim, is even less
likely within such a short geological time frame. They conclude that the need
for a designer is strongly supported by the new findings."' Scientists, however,
have viewed the situation from a fundamentally different philosophical point
of view. Instead of seeing a disproof of the scientific approach, they have seen
a crisis that called for creative thinking and innovation. Exobiology science has
responded dramatically, across the board, with new research agendas and refor-
mulation of many of its most basic assumptions.

Having been incubated at JPL in the years leading up to Viking, the Gaia
hypothesis, as a scientific theory as well as a broadly influential social meta-
phor, came to maturity during this period. By the late 1980s scientists began to
realize that it had made significant contributions to what later would be called
"Earth System Science."

A flood of new data poured in during these years as well, about the exist-
ence of hitherto unknown but nonetheless complex communities of life forms
living around hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the deep oceans, about more
and more ancient microfossils narrowing the time window in which life must
have originated, about the Archaea, about comets, the impact of extraterrestrial
bodies with Earth, the relationship of such impacts to climate and to mass ex-
tinction, the lunar and Martian origin of many meteorites that had landed on
Earth, and, finally, new laboratory data on membranes and on the ability of RNA

105

106 The Living Universe

to act as an enzyme. This information catalyzed new lines of thinking in labo-
ratory work, but, more important, it turned the attention in exobiology more
sharply than ever toward the heavens — not just to other planets but also to com-
ets, asteroids, and meteorites as objects of extreme interest for thinking about
the origin of life on Earth.^

Perhaps most important of all, debates over "punctuated equilibrium"
theory in evolutionary biology, the recognition (beginning in 1974 but not widely
accepted until 1984) that the Moon probably formed from a violent catastrophic
collision between Earth and a Mars-sized body,^ then, in June 1980, that the
dinosaurs were in all likelihood extinguished by an asteroid impact on Earth
sixty-five million years ago combined to startle astronomers, geologists, biolo-
gists, and even exobiologists into recognizing that they had been wearing rather
dogmatic "gradualist" blinders, inherited from Darwin and his mentor, Charles
Lyell.'' As if to underscore the point for any still dozing, six weeks after the first
publication of the dinosaur-asteroid impact theory, a dozing Mt. St. Helens took
the world by surprise and erupted in one of the most violently explosive displays
in recorded history. Although Gould's punctuated equilibrium theory remains
controversial, more rapid change in evolution, cosmic as well as terrestrial,
became less unthinkable. The renewed "catastrophist" astronomy, geology, and
evolutionary biology since 1 980, as well as the discovery of the "third king-
dom" of Archaea and the firm establishment of Lovelock's ideas, owe much to
the field of exobiology and to NASA funding. So do thriving new fields of
research on the "RNA world" and on possible hydrothermal settings for the origin
of life.

Hydrothermal Vents, Archaea

In January 1977 scientists exploring the hydrothermal vents in the pitch
blackness at the Galapagos rift, 2.5 km deep in the Pacific Ocean, got the sur-
prise of their lives. Entire ecological communities of life were thriving profusely
in the pitch blackness, where no photosynthesis was possible for primary pro-
duction. Not just microorganisms but complex tubeworms several feet long,
crabs, and many other creatures grew quite happily at temperatures and pres-
sures previously thought impossible and, it was soon discovered, were supplied
nutrition entirely from chemosynthetic primary production by sulfur-oxidizing
bacteria and other chemolithotrophs (bacteria that can obtain energy purely from
oxidation of inorganic compounds).^ John B. Corliss, at the University of
Oregon, and Holger Jannasch, marine microbiologist at Woods Hole Oceano-
graphic Institute, were among the first biologists to study these new life forms
and ecosystems.*

In October and November 1977 Carl Woese and his research group at the
University of Illinois, working on projects funded by NASA Exobiology since
1975, announced one of the most remarkable discoveries of twentieth-century
biology (fig. 5.1). Studying the 16s ribosomal RNA of many different microor-

The Post-WV\n% Revolutions 107

Figure 5.1. Carl Woese, at work in his lab at the University of Illinois. Urbana.
examining by hand some of the voluminous 16s rRNA data that led to
recognition of the Archaea as a "third domain," 1 976. (Courtesy C. Woese.)

ganisms, the researchers found that methanogens (methane-producers), halo-
philes (microbes that can tolerate high salinity), thermophiles, and hyper-
thermophiles (microbes that can live at high and ultra-high temperatures), all
of which had previously been classified as bacteria, were as different from them
as the bacteria were from eukaryotes (all plants, animals, and fungi are eukary-
otes). Woese and his colleagues called this new "third kingdom" of organisms
the Archaebacteria (later Archaea), and they argued that nature really contained

108 The Living Universe

three discrete divisions of life: the Archaea, the Eubacteria, and the Eukarya.
This difference was more fundamental, they argued, than the older division into
prokaryotes and eukaryotes (essentially, bacteria vs. everything else including
humans). Furthermore, the Woese group suggested that the Archaea were on the
oldest part of the tree of life, closest to the "root," or last common ancestor of
all forms living today.^ Thus, as soon as the hyperthermophilic organisms of
the undersea vents were recognized and determined to be Archaea, many oth-
ers besides Woese's group began to speculate about the relevance of the Archaea
for the origin of life (OOL), given their lineage and their capabilities for living
under harsh conditions. (It is worth noting that, by 1998, with new data Woese
came to believe that the last common ancestor was actually a heterogeneous
population of cells with considerable horizontal gene transfer, rather than a dis-
crete single entity.)^

What made the intellectual breakthrough of seeing a fundamentally tri-
partite division in living nature so difficult? Woese himself thinks it is a classic
case of what Thomas Kuhn called a "paradigm shift."' There is some reason,
however, to suspect that Woese's training may have caused microbiologists to
regard his initial claims with skepticism. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Ernest
Pollard's unusual new Biophysics Program at Yale University in 1953. Among
burgeoning new "biophysics" departments of the immediate postwar period,
Pollard's Yale department was something of an unusual beast, and Pollard's per-
sonality was a source of friction with many who even thought of themselves as
allies.'" Even if one accepts that, as with his younger colleagues Morowitz and
Woese, Pollard was "ahead of his time" in his sweepingly interdisciplinary ap-
proach to biophysics, it is nonetheless clear that this would create disciplinary
rivalries and bad blood, sufficient to serve as barriers to the easy acceptance of
revolutionary new ways of seeing "theoretical biology," above and beyond the
paradigm-breaking nature of the ideas themselves. Robert MacNab, also of Yale
Biophysics, said that as late as 1974 his work on bacterial flagella was still re-
garded with deep and basic suspicion, even dismissal, by microbiologists such as
Raymond Doetsch, primarily because he was not trained as a microbiologist and
therefore "did not know the first thing about bacteria; for example, that one sim-
ply cannot see flagella in unstained living preparations by light microscopy.""

In response to this alternate interpretation, Woese's own perception is that
"in my case it was a paradigmatic issue primarily, the fact that I wasn't a micro-
biologist was secondary. The prokaryote-eukaryote dichotomy, since Stanier and
VanNiel's 1962 paper, had been absolute dogma in microbiology. And, of course,
biologists in general also had traditionally accepted it lock, stock, and barrel."'^

Nor did the resistance, at least in many circles in evolutionary biology,
end with the broad general acceptance of Woese's three-kingdom doctrine in
the 1980s. Ernst Mayr at Harvard, for example, put up a strong argument against
a three-kingdom view of life.'^ And he attempted to recruit others, such as Lynn
MarguHs, to his cause. '"*

Influenced by Woese's discoveries about archaebacteria and his belief that

The Post-Viking Revolutions 109

such "extremophiles" and chemolithotrophs were probably the most ancient Hfe
forms, Benton Clark, a veteran of the Viking mission, began to reason that hy-
drothermal vents would have been common in the early history of the Earth and
suggested an origin of life based on sulfur compounds as the key energy sources.
In addition, John Corliss, John Baross, a specialist in microbial life in extreme
environments from the University of Washington, and others argued that, be-
cause life was able to thrive at such temperatures and pressures, with condi-
tions more stable than the vicissitudes of the ocean-atmosphere interface, the
vent environment was a more likely place for the origin of life. They suggested
a high-temperature origin, probably first of Woese's "archaeal" life.'^ Hyper-
thermophiles quickly became a "hot topic" in origin of life research,'^ and head-
lines began to appear speculating on "life's first scalding steps" and other similar
titles.'^

The Primitive Atmosphere

There is another important part of the intellectual context that made a high-
temperature origin of life attractive at this time. The problem was twofold:
geochemists had finally begun, after many years, to convince most of the re-
search community that the Earth's early atmosphere was probably not chemi-
cally reducing (hydrogen-rich) but, rather, neutral. Second, as older and older
microfossils were found, the time window available for the origin of life pro-
cess was drastically narrowing. We will look at each of these in turn.

From nearly the beginning of modem scientific work on the origin of life,
some prominent geologists and geochemists argued that the composition of the
Earth's early atmosphere might not have been chemically reducing, despite how
central this point was for Oparin and for the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment. Wil-
liam Rubey, a geologist who wrote papers in the 1950s and was a contempo-
rary of Urey, pointed out as early as 1951 that CO2 and H2O, not CH4 and NH3,
were the main gases coming out of volcanoes.'* According to biochemist John
Cronin, "Urey's reduced atmosphere, although influential, was kind of an
anomaly that flourished for awhile until modem ideas of planetary formation
and evolution made it untenable. Much of the early work didn't assume a re-
duced atmosphere, e.g., the Chamberlins in 1908 and Haldane in 1929." With
Harrison Brown and Hans Suess's 1949 work on terrestrial atmospheric noble
gases, it became clear that the Earth's atmosphere was not derived from some
primordial H2-rich primary atmosphere, and with William Rubey 's 1951 ideas
about a secondary atmosphere arising from degassing of the earth's interior and
H. D. Holland's 1962 work on the redox state of the mantle, says Cronin, "Urey's
atmosphere began to lose favor pretty early with geochemists and atmospheric
scientists, although due to Miller's work and its hold on the 'popular' imagina-
tion it continued to hold sway in the wider OOL community for some time. Since
it is not possible to absolutely rule it out for some brief period and/or in
specialized locales in the early Archaean period, it still has its adherents.""

110 The Living Universe

Penn State University geoscientist James Kasting states, "I would say . . .
however, that it was really Jim [James C. G.] Walker who did the most to change
our ideas about the nature of the early atmosphere. His 1 977 book. Evolution of
the Atmosphere, laid the foundation for the weakly reduced, CO2-H2O-N2 at-
mosphere that is currently favored. Dick [H. D.] Holland also played a role in
all of this, although his 1962 model was a multi-stage one that started off strongly
reduced and then became weakly reduced later on." He adds a recent after-
thought:

I should point out that during the last few years, I have come to realize
that there should have been significant abiotic sources of CH4 on the
early Earth from submarine outgassing. There is some discussion of this
in my chapter in Andre Brack's 1998 book. The Molecular Origins of
Life. However, even that discussion is now somewhat out of date. Most
of the methane probably comes from serpentinization of ultramafic rocks
and perhaps from impact catalyzed reduction of CO2. My latest thoughts
have not yet been formally written up. I don't think that early Earth
had a highly reduced CH4-NH3 atmosphere, but I do think it had sub-
stantial amounts (100 ppm or more) of CH4, in addition to CO2, H2O,
N2, and traces of CO and H2.^''

Keith Kvenvolden's 1974 book Geochemistry and the Origin of Life re-
printed several of the original papers from the 1949-1962 period, gaining wider
attention for the view that the early atmosphere might not have been reducing
in nature. Geophysicist (and editor of Science) Phil Abelson also made the case
for carbon monoxide as the primary form of carbon, rather than methane, in a
1966 paper that both Stanley Miller and Norman Horowitz took immediate no-
tice of. 2'

By 1 980 science journalist Richard Kerr wrote in Science that the con-
sensus of the research community (Miller was still a prominent exception) was
now leaning toward a nonreducing atmosphere at the time life first began on
Earth. And, because Miller's latest experiments with CO, H2O, and other less-
reduced gases showed drastically reduced yields of organic compounds produced
in a Miller-Urey apparatus, the apparent lesson was that synthesis of organic
building blocks for life was more difficult than had been believed. One of the
cornerstones of the optimistic OOL research paradigm of the generation since
1953 now seemed very shaky at best.^^

The Narrowing Time Window

In 1954 Stanley Tyler and Elso Barghoom reported on the first Precam-
brian microfossils, nearly two biOion years old from the Gunflint chert on the
northern shore of Lake Superior.^^ In 1965 Barghoom, his graduate student J.
William Schopf, and longtime stromatolite expert Preston Cloud announced a
new round of such discoveries, continuing into 1967.^" From 1967 to 1969

The /"oi?- Viking Revolutions 111

Barghoom and Schopf received thirty-five thousand dollars per year in NASA
Exobiology funds; in 1969, with newly minted Ph.D., Schopf set up a lab at
UCLA, with fifty thousand dollars per year in NASA Exobiology money to ex-
pand the search.^^ Through the late 1960s a rapid string of discoveries of micro-
fossils piled up; by 1977 Barghoom and his new student Andy Knoll found
convincing microfossils as old as 3.4 billion years in the Fig Tree series of South
Africa.^* Very few older rocks were known, and most of them had been so meta-
morphosed that there was little hope of finding convincing microfossils any older
than those already found. By February 1978 Stephen Jay Gould wrote in his
widely read column in the magazine Natural History: "If prokaryotes were well
established 3.4 billion years ago, how much further back shall we seek the ori-
gin of life?"^^ He pointed out that conditions on Earth had only been suitable
for life for at most a few hundred million years prior to the Fig Tree organisms,
which were eubacteria. Yet, citing Woese's November 1977 discovery that the
common ancestry of Archaea and Eubacteria must lie even further back, Gould
concluded that the origin of life must have occurred very rapidly and almost
immediately after conditions for it permitted. The contrast of this new conclu-
sion with the "long, drawn-out" scenario so deeply ingrained in the OOL com-
munity of the 1950s and 1960s, made obvious what a deeply rooted prejudice
the "long, slow process" model had been since Darwin.

In reality, in the community itself the realization of the shortening time
window had been dawning rather more steadily and earlier than Gould's essay
seemed to suggest. As early as 1968 exobiologist Alan Schwartz (now head of
his own research group [fig. 5.2]), for example, had been "struck by the rapidly
decreasing 'window' for the origin of life which fossil discoveries was generat-
ing and wrote a short manuscript on the subject. I sent it to a geochemical col-
league for criticism. His response was that the realization of the shortness of
the time available was pretty much common knowledge," so Schwartz, cha-
grined, never submitted the manuscript.-^^ Nonetheless, many researchers were
only just coming to this realization, so Gould's basic point was valid: between
the late 1960s and about the time of Woese's announcement of the three king-
doms, the OOL community did slowly come to a new view. The process of life's
origin either could not be long and drawn-out, or else a lot of the early stages
(the formation of organic building blocks) had to take place in extraterrestrial
settings. The strong possibility of a nonreducing atmosphere seemed to confirm
this conclusion and to press home the other major intellectual shift to which
Gould was pointing. Origin of life chemistry, it now seemed clear, could not
have been a matter of chance, random bumping together of molecules requiring
endless billions of years, as George Wald posited in an influential summary of
the field written shortly after the Miller-Urey experiment.^^ The chemistry must
have been constrained by some natural limits to lead spontaneously in the di-
rection of living systems fairly directly and rapidly — perhaps as little as ten mil-
lion years to go from abiotic conditions to cyanobacteria, according to one 1994
estimate.^" Thus, amid the intellectual disorientation and reorientation of this

112 The Living Universe

Figure 5.2. Alan Schwartz and his research group at the University of Nijmegen, the
Netherlands, 1987. (Courtesy A. Schwartz).

period, even if nobody was really sure at first how such chemistry must work,
it seemed the news was not all bad for origin of life work.

In early February 1977, less than a month after the new undersea vent
discoveries, UCLA paleontologist J. William Schopf and Indiana University
geochemist John Hayes had a conversation with NASA Exobiology's Dick
Young to try out a new idea on him. In the wake of the OPEC oil embargo and
the economic slump that followed in the United States, post-Apo//o NASA bud-
gets shrank even faster than they had before. The fat times of the 1960s and
early 1970s were only a memory now. Still, Schopf had been thinking for some
time that Precambrian paleobiology needed a concentrated period of intense close
group effort by leading researchers in the field and in related disciplines such
as geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry, microbiology, climatology, and atmospheric
chemistry. Schopf dreamed of a fourteen-month-long Precambrian Paleobiology
Study Group (PPRG) centered at UCLA. Dick Young thought the idea a good
one and said that '"in principle' his program 'might possibly' be interested in
supporting such a project."^' Encouraged, in March 1977 Schopf contacted those
he hoped would form the nucleus of such a group, to begin putting together a
detailed, formal grant proposal. Included were Hayes, Hans Hofmann, Ian
Kaplan, David Raup, and Malcolm Walter. Almost immediately, Schopf got a
windfall; he received word in April that he had been selected to receive a

The Post-Viking Revolutions 113

$150,000 Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation,
enough, he thought, to cover perhaps half the cost of his PPRG dream project.
Thus, he applied to NASA Exobiology in January 1 978 for only the same amount
in matching funds. By June an expanded fourteen-member group met at UCLA
for a planning session; by November Dick Young notified the group that the
funds had been approved. In late May 1979 Hayes, Hoffman, and Walter set off
on a four-week field trip to Australia, Africa, and Canada to fill in gaps in a
complete geological sample collection representing the entire Archaean and Pro-
terozoic eras. A total group of twenty-four scientists then convened in July to
begin studying the entire collection, regular meetings, and the preparation of
reports. About half the group was in residence at UCLA for the entire fourteen-
month period of the PPRG; some were there for periods of weeks or months;
the remainder worked solely at their own institutions, save for the final group
meeting in August 1980. The group produced Earth 's Earliest Biosphere, a mas-
sive compendium volume of everything known to date on Precambrian paleo-
biology and much of what was known in many related areas such as prebiotic
organic synthesis and the evolution of the Earth's environment in the period af-
ter life appeared. ^^

A very similar effort was organized by Schopf nine years later, also
with help from NASA Exobiology funds, to focus more intensively on the
slightly later Proterozoic period and to take into account the explosion of new
research in the intervening decade. This resulted in 1992 in a second volume.
The Proterozoic Biosphere, which has become as much a standard encyclope-
dia of the field as the first book was. ^^ In 1993 Schopf announced new micro-
fossil discoveries from the Apex chert formation of western Australia that pushed
the oldest known microfossils, which Schopf suggested bore strong resemblance
to existing cyanobacteria, back to 3.45 billion years ago.^"* Schopf states that the
two crucial, intensive, synthetic PPRG research groups did so much to consoli-
date and catalyze work in Precambrian paleobiology, and in generally relevant
exobiological topics, that he sees NASA funding as crucial to the spectacular
progress this field has made in the past thirty-five years. On the initial 1978
PPRG application he planned to staff the project with the best relatively young
scientists available, rather than well-established luminaries in the field. As a re-
sult, the proposal was strongly criticized by two senior reviewers, probably
Barghoom and Cloud, Schopf speculates. Despite these negative reviews, Schopf
says,

Dick Young, then Exobiology officer, . . . funded us. (He, in my opin-
ion, was the great hero in the matter.) His faith bore fruit. The product
of our work (Earth 's Earliest Biosphere, . . . ) was judged the 1983 "Out-
standing Volume in the Physical Sciences" by the Association of Ameri-
can Publishers. Years later, again with NASA funding, I set up a second
PPRG, ... the product of which (The Proterozoic Biosphere) was judged
the 1992 "Outstanding Volume in Geography and Earth Science" by the

114 The Living Universe

Association of American Publishers. As far as I am aware, receipt of
two such national awards is unprecedented — and both were based partly
or wholly on NASA funding. ... the two great PPRG volumes have, I
believe, both set the standard and charted the course of the field of Pre-
cambrian paleobiology for every interested scientist, worldwide. With-
out NASA's backing, I can't imagine how this would have happened. ^^

NASA Exobiology strikes again. Twice in the same spot.

As we shall see in chapter 8, work has not always been so completely
free of criticism for Schopf and his UCLA group (most recently, the 3.45 bil-
lion year old Apex chert microfossils have been questioned as possibly artifacts),
but there can be no doubt that they have indeed contributed much to setting the
standard for research in Precambrian paleobiology. They (and Schopf in par-
ticular) have become a powerful force to be reckoned with in exobiology, so
much so that one recent book referred to Bill Schopf as the "dean of the early
fossil record."-'*

The Gaia Hypothesis

A major exobiology meeting convened at NASA Ames Research Center
on 19-20 June 1979. With all the new data pouring in, John Billingham of Ames
saw a need to reconsider the big questions, both in origin of life research, what
was known of conditions relevant to life on other planets, and SETT; as a re-
sult, he arranged the "Conference on Life in the Universe."^^ It was here that
Benton Clark proposed the model cited earlier for OOL based on sulfur bio-
chemistry. Soon after this, Dick Young retired as the head of Exobiology (now
called Planetary Biology) at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. Donald
DeVincenzi, his deputy, who had trained under Young for a year as well as in
administrative positions at NASA Ames, became the new Exobiology head in
August 1979.

Since the Viking results had so strikingly borne out Lovelock's prediction
that Mars would be lifeless based on its atmospheric chemistry. Lovelock and
Margulis (fig. 5.3) and their Gaia hypothesis got a prominent place on the agenda
of Billingham's conference. This was a crucial turning point for the theory. Not
only was it being given a high-profile podium just at the time Lovelock's first
book on Gaia came out; perhaps just as important was that Stephen Schneider,
a leading atmospheric researcher from the National Center for Atmospheric Re-
search (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, was at the meeting and was much im-
pressed by the potential power of the Gaia hypothesis. It was Schneider who
critically addressed the idea and its promise in a 1984 mass-market book. The
CoEvolution of Climate and Life, and in a television documentary produced in
1985 by the BBC's "Horizon" and the American "NOVA" series. ^^ In addition
Schneider, along with Penelope Boston, organized the first major conference to
evaluate the scientific merit of the Gaia hypothesis, under the auspices of the

The Po^?- Viking Revolutions 115

Figure 5.3. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, codevelopers of the Gaia hypothesis,
and Spanish microbiologist Ricardo Guerrero, c. 1990. (Courtesy J. Lovelock).

American Geophysical Union, in March 1988.^' And in a series of meetings at
Ames in 1981-1982 on the evolution of complex and higher organisms, con-
vened by BiUingham and David Raup, the participants reached the following
major conclusion: "Of special interest, is the controversial Gaia hypothesis,
which proposes that living things have prevented drastic climatic changes on
the Earth throughout most of its history. This view, regarded as highly specula-
tive and tentative by many workers, has yet to be rigorously examined. If it
proves to be correct, and if climatic stabilization can be shown to be a likely
consequence of the activities of life on other worlds as well, then we may ex-
pect that extraterrestrial life is abundant throughout the universe. An effort should
be made therefore, to determine whether the Gaia hypothesis is valid.'"^

Given the potential fruitfulness of the Gaia hypothesis, recognized no later
than this time by many in the exobiology community, it is a fascinating phe-
nomenon worthy of study just how much resistance Gaia generated in the geol-
ogy, atmospheric science, climatology, and evolutionary biology communities.

116 The Living Universe

Charles Darwin had some good rhetorical reasons for clinging so tenaciously
to his term natural selection, despite intense criticism that, to many, it implied
an anthropomorphic, voluntaristic "selector" in nature."*' And in a story with some
interesting parallels James Lovelock's term Gaia was attacked from the begin-
ning; the same charges were brought: it's anthropomorphic (no matter how many
times he said, "I meant it as a metaphor"), you're assigning agency to a natural
process and therefore secretly slipping a supernatural Creator back in through
the back door, and so forth. Ironically, this time it was the hard-line natural
selectionists (W. Ford Doolittle, Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, and
William Hamilton) who attacked the metaphor for having voluntarist overtones,
having themselves worked hard to press the "selfish gene" metaphor to supple-
ment the natural selection of their revered forefather Darwin.'*^

From the beginning the key technical criticism was how behavior by a
microorganism that benefited the biosphere as a whole but not itself (and might
even sometimes be detrimental to its own survival, such as the first release of
oxygen by anaerobes) could ever evolve and persist by natural selection. And
Lovelock acknowledges that the early versions of the theory, up through his 1 979
book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, suffered from an inadequate consid-
eration of this question."*^ He developed the "Daisyworld" mathematical model,
in collaboration with Andrew Watson of Reading University, to answer these
objections.'*^ The 1981-1982 NASA ECHO Workshop participants, who found
the hypothesis intriguing said: "Although many of us are skeptical, we agree
that the Gaia mechanism approaches one extreme of a spectrum of possibilities
(ranging from total control of a planet's environment by its organisms to total
lack of control) and that much further study is needed to determine the causes
of large-scale environmental stability and change. . . . The Gaia hypothesis in
particular could be investigated by seeking to identify evolutionary mechanisms
(if any such exist) that are capable of selecting organisms whose activities pro-
mote global environmental stability.'"'^

A key intellectual barrier was the idea in geology, evolutionary biology,
and environmental science that the environment changes and affects organisms
but that organisms themselves were mostly passive recipients of such selective
forces. For most of these researchers it required a deep reconceptualization to
see living organisms as potent forces, shaping conditions on Earth just as power-
fully (or perhaps more so) as they were being shaped by those external
conditions. But in addition the name Gaia drew a great deal of fire for suggest-
ing, via the image of the ancient Greek Earth goddess, everything from vague
New Age mysticism to teleology reimported into biology after a 150-year
struggle by evolutionary biology to banish it. In the ensuing "take no prison-
ers" firefight. Lovelock has modified his theory to reflect the valid points his
critics have driven home."*^

Exobiology (and, more recently, astrobiology) after the disappointment of
Viking has fully incorporated Lovelock's insight (usually without attribution) that
life detection strategies need, insofar as possible, to be "non-Earthcentric."*^

The Post-W iking Revolutions 117

After the modifications of the theory as presented in Lovelock's second book
in 1988, more researchers in the exobiology community found Lovelock's theory
acceptable. Harold Morowitz wrote, for instance, that origin of life researchers
now needed to understand that "in [Lovelock's] sense, life is a property of planets
rather than of individual organisms." This view was complementary, rather than
contradictory, with the traditional biology view that sought to define life by com-
paring what all living organisms have in common."^ Indeed, under the name
Earth system science the core of the modified Gaia theory is now mainstream
science, but, say the critics, "never under the name Gaia."

Lovelock, however, tenaciously defends Gaia and insists that "names are
important.'"*' Describing one striking episode, he says:

I stuck with the name Gaia because my Green friends and quite a few
scientists regarded a change of name as a betrayal and so do 1. 1 did try
the neologism "geophysiology" for scientists and it worked for a while
until the snarling dogs realized it was just another name for Gaia. I over-
heard a distinguished geophysicist at NCAR say to a young scientist,
"I will not have you use the word geophysiology — it's just closet Gaia."
[In] Mary Midgley's new book Science and Poetry ... she deals in full
with the name Gaia and why it was rejected by so many scientists. . . .
A great deal of the fuss over Gaia is because I work as an independent
and only rarely go to meetings of scientists. It is hard to appreciate the
work of someone you do not know.^"

Thus, as with Woese, even those whose ideas got off the ground in the intense
interdisciplinary environment of NASA Exobiology in the 1960s could run into
trouble because of plain old disciplinary turf defense, if the main body of the
discipline, such as geology or climatology, was still outside of the exobiology
context. Lovelock has written at some length on this problem, making it diffi-
cult if not impossible for a scientist to operate outside academia as an "inde-
pendent."5' He himself barely managed it, even with a long track record of
training and research in prestigious British government science establishments
prior to transitioning to independent status as an inventor and a consultant to
NASA and to industry groups.

Lovelock believes that since the late 1990s or so the climate has improved
to some extent. But still not enough that many of the neo-Darwinians with whom
the vitriolic public conflict occurred will ever openly credit the term Gaia, even
if they accept most of what is now called Earth System Science. Says Lovelock:

The grandees over here are ready to admit, even at small meetings, that
they were wrong to ridicule Gaia, but apart from Bill Hamilton no one
will go public. John Maynard Smith used his powerful influence to have
Tim Lenton's article "Gaia and Natural Selection" published by Nature
as the lead article. Richard Dawkins, at a closed meeting in Oxford of
about 25 scientists, said after I had spoken on Gaia and evolution, "Jim

118 The Living Universe

has his disciples and I have mine, they both get it wrong." John Lawton,
now head of the UK Research Council, NERC, had an editorial in Sci-
ence on Earth System science, which generously acknowledged the
Gaian contribution. It could be much worse. ^-

John Lawton's acknowledgment of Lovelock and Gaia is certainly more
than many scientists who face such opposition ever see in their own lifetime:
"Physicists have long understood the 'Goldilocks effect' — why, in general terms.
Earth's natural blanket of atmospheric CO2 and distance from the sun make the
planet 'just right' for life, neither too hot (like Venus) nor too cold (like Mars).
James Lovelock's penetrating insights that a planet with abundant life will have
an atmosphere shifted into extreme thermodynamic disequilibrium, and that Earth
is habitable because of complex linkages and feedbacks between the atmosphere,
oceans, land and biosphere, were major stepping stones in the emergence of this
new science [Earth System Science]. "^^ Lovelock sees an interesting parallel
between the opposition to the new "catastrophism" that broke through during
this period and the opposition to Gaia theory. (Kuhn's Structure of Scientific
Revolutions seems to be widely read among exobiology scientists, especially
those who perceive themselves as outsiders.)^'' Both, he claims, were so basically
opposed to a powerful Kuhnian paradigm that intense opposition was inevitable:

So powerful was this dogma [of Lyellian/Darwinian gradualism] that it
persisted, in spite of abundant contrary evidence, until Alvarez and his
colleagues produced almost unequivocal evidence for an impact catas-
trophe as the cause of the KT extinction. During the 150 years from
1830 to 1980, any mention of sudden evolutionary change was treated
as if it were heresy and most geologists found it prudent never to speak
of catastrophes. It took the hard evidence and the superior rank of the
Nobel Laureate Alvarez, to break the ice. Even so, he was amazed by
the fury and bad manners of those Earth scientists who still continued
to attack his research. So I am indeed naive if I think that the even more
heretical theory of Gaia will be recognized by the great Church of Sci-
ence. Young scientists, who imagine that they have nothing to lose, oc-
casionally break ranks, as in the New York Times article, but even then
only obliquely.^^

So, what is the Alvarez discovery to which Lovelock refers, and how did it come
about? At least partly, the reader by now may not be surprised to hear, with help
from NASA funding.

Of Asteroids, IVIass Extinctions, Dust Storms,
and Nuclear Winter

Physicist Luis W. Alvarez (winner of the 1 968 Nobel Physics Prize) and
his son Walter of the University of California-Berkeley Geology Department

The Posf- Viking Revolutions 119

had noticed an anomalously high level of the rare metal iridium in the very thin
clay layer at the boundary between the rocks of the late Cretaceous period and
the early Tertiary (the K-T boundary). It occurred to them that iridium was al-
most exclusively known from extraterrestrial sources such as asteroids and me-
teorites. Thus, the Alvarezes began to examine samples of the K-T layer from
different locations around the world to see whether the iridium anomaly was
local or more widespread; they found it to be global in its occurrence. This im-
mediately suggested the possibility of a large asteroid impact, the explosion from
which was large enough to distribute extraterrestrial material all over the globe
and which, not incidentally, might finally answer the age-old question of what
had brought about the sudden end of the dinosaurs (and so many other species
that this was called a mass extinction by paleontologists).'^ When their paper,
with coworkers Frank Asaro and Helen Michel, was published in Science on 6
June 1980, it provoked both excitement and skepticism, as noted earlier. Walter
Alvarez had been supported by NSF funds, the remainder of the team by De-
partment of Energy funds, and Luis Alvarez additionally received NASA money
for the work.5^ Subsequently, the Alvarez team was funded by NASA Exobiol-
ogy to continue its research.'^ By October 1981 a meeting had been convened
in Snowbird, Utah, of paleontologists, specialists in asteroid impacts, iridium
spikes, and so forth, to evaluate the Alvarez theory. The consensus was strongly
in favor of the Alvarez team's theory. Follow-up calculations indicated that an
asteroid of about ten kilometers in diameter was necessary to produce the iri-
dium levels measured. The search began for the geological remnant of what must
be a very large crater, hundreds of kilometers in diameter, produced by the im-
pact. By the late 1 980s it appeared that the Chicxulub formation, on the bottom
of the Gulf of Mexico, just east of the Yucatan Peninsula, was indeed the crater
made by the K-T impact. Calculations soon showed that the amount of dust
thrown into the atmosphere by such an enormous explosion would block out
the sunlight for months or perhaps years, dropping photosynthesis levels and
temperature so drastically that it could more than account for the mass extinc-
tions, including the dinosaurs.

The investigation of mass extinctions under NASA auspices did not end
with the Alvarez paper; it was only just beginning. David Raup, a well-known
paleontologist from the University of Chicago and the Field Museum, had been
a member of Schopf's PPRG in 1979-1980. His first direct contact with NASA
Exobiology, however, came in July 1981, when, at the invitation of NASA
Ames's John Billingham, he chaired the first of three workshops devoted to the
"Evolution of Complex and Higher Organisms," the so-called ECHO workshops,
held at Ames. The succeeding sessions were held in January and May 1982.
Raup had studied in some depth the extinction of marine species in the geo-
logic past. After the very first ECHO meeting, he and his younger colleague
Joseph J. Sepkoski Jr. were stimulated to think further about how often these
extinctions came in massive clusters.

By March 1982 Raup and Sepkoski published a paper in Science

120 The Living Universe

demonstrating that there had been no less than five major mass extinctions and
launching a search for their (perhaps astronomical or astrophysical) cause.^' Their
work showed that the average "background" extinction rate was between 2.0
and 4.6 families per million years of geologic time. The mass extinction events
stood out even more dramatically than had previously been realized: these epi-
sodes reached extinction rates of 19.3 families per million years. As Raup later
put it, describing how important the ECHO meetings had been as a stimulus to
this new line of research, "Largely as a result of interactions at the meetings, . . .
Raup and Sepkoski launched a statistical analysis of data bearing on a proposi-
tion made earlier by another of the participants (Fischer) to the effect that bio-
logic extinctions on Earth have had a periodic distribution in geologic time, and
that the periodicity is driven by extraterrestrial forces."*" The analysis was pub-
lished in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).^^

When they had completed their statistical analysis, Raup, in May 1984,
wrote: "The publication of this new analysis . . . led, in turn, to the publication
of no fewer than five papers by geologists and astrophysicists, proposing mecha-
nisms for the extraterrestrial driving force. . . . Whereas this line of research is
far from complete, it is clear that the ECHO meetings played an important role
in catalyzing these new initiatives in space research, initiatives which may have
far-reaching consequences for biology as well as for the space sciences."*^

Raup and Sepkoski were subsequently funded by NASA Exobiology, from
1983 to 1994, when Raup retired. As Raup put it: "My own funding from NASA
started, as you can see, shortly after the workshops. Not coincidental."*^ Summing
up his experience with NASA for this research, as opposed to NSF, where com-
petition and increasing paperwork requirements made funding steadily more
complicated and unreliable, he continued: "John Billingham was the prime mover
in the effort to extend the origin and early history of life studies to more recent
evolutionary history. John and I worked closely to arrange the workshops, se-
lect participants, and get funding from Headquarters. The report speaks for itself.
The group meetings were a wonderful experience in the mixing of disciplines
and were responsible directly or indirectly for a variety of research collabora-
tions and initiatives. . . . My motives for using NASA rather than NSF or other
funding sources are obscure. I had been supported by NSF off and on for 20
years at that time but it was getting more and more difficult and time-consum-
ing. Thus, the less formal, more personal, atmosphere of NASA was attracfive.
Also, the kind of synoptic work I did probably fit better with the NASA culture
than that of NSF. It was a good experience all around."*^

After their PNAS analysis convinced Raup and Sepkoski that a periodic
mass extinction cycle needed much closer attention, and, well before the paper
came out in print, astronomers did indeed begin hypothesizing many possible
causes. "Through word of mouth, preprints, and particularly news stories in Sci-
ence and Science News [in September 1983]; researchers who . . . think more
about outer space than the fossil record heard about the proposed 26 million
year periodicity. The rush was on."*^ When Luis Alvarez showed the preprint

The Post-WMng Revolutions 121

to astronomer Richard MuUer at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, for example, Muller
had postulated within an hour "that an unseen companion [star] circling the sun
once every 26 million years could be responsible."^^ A^a/Mre published five pa-
pers by separate research groups, including one by Rich Muller and Walter
Alvarez, coming to a similar conclusion in the same issue. Most concluded that
the star must be a "brown dwarf' (a substellar object intermediate in mass be-
tween a star and planet) of low luminosity; otherwise, it would have been no-
ticed already by astronomers. Raup and the Alvarez team immediately began
organizing a conference, held on 1-^ March 1984 at Lawrence Berkeley Labs,
on hypothetical multiple comet impacts and their effect on evolution. Alvarez
recalls: "Almost everyone active in the field attended. Gene Shoemaker spent
an entire aftemoon telling us why no one should believe in 'Rich's star,'" which
was soon dubbed "Nemesis." Still, at least at the time of his writing in 1986 or
1987, Luis Alvarez believed the case for Nemesis and periodic extinctions (on
a 28.5 million-year cycle) was quite strong. It should be noted, however, that
by 1990 the consensus of the scientific community leaned against periodicity
being real, though the idea is still kicking around.^^ As Raup put it:

If one were to poll miscellaneous geologists, paleontologists, and as-
tronomers, I think you would find a strong consensus opposed to peri-
odicity. The negative views would be based on some or all of the
following arguments:

* Statistical support for periodicity in the extinction record is weak or
flawed.

* The Nemesis orbit would be unstable.

* None of the other proposed mechanisms is viable.

On the other hand, the idea is still around and many people would jump
on any new data that might confirm periodicity. I think Rich Muller is
still confident of finding confirmation through dating of lunar impacts
or by finding Nemesis in sky surveys. . . . For me, periodicity may or
may not be real. Arguments on both sides are good ones and we can't
do much more until a new and independent source of data appears. But
the idea is certainly alive.^^

The Alvarez asteroid theory was at least partly responsible for the con-
vening of several important scientific meetings: the NASA Ames ECHO meet-
ings as well as the October 1981 meeting in Snowbird, Utah, mentioned by
William Hartmann at the opening of this chapter. But one of the first and politi-
cally most important fallouts from the Alvarez asteroid extinction theory was
described by Luis Alvarez: "Soon after my colleagues and I published our im-
pact hypothesis, a group of atmospheric experts at the NASA Ames Laboratory
examined it in detail. They confirmed our general conclusions but thought that
the dust cloud would fall out more quickly than we had predicted. A study that
grew out of that work is the now-famous 'nuclear winter' paper that proposed

122 The Living Universe

that smoke from fires set by exploding nuclear weapons would similarly block
out sunlight worldwide with consequences similarly dire. . . . The fact that nei-
ther of the two superpowers' nuclear- weapons establishments had thought about
the possibility of a nuclear winter has sobered everyone concerned with fight-
ing a nuclear war."*'

The team at NASA Ames included Richard Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas
Ackerman, James Pollack, as well as Pollack's former Ph.D. advisor, Cornell
astronomer Carl Sagan. Sagan and Pollack had studied the planet-wide dust
storms on Mars first clearly seen by Manner 9. They had begun, along with
Turco, Toon, and Ackerman, modeling the dust cloud after the Alvarez asteroid
impact and soon realized a similar dust cloud might have similar or even worse
effects after even a "limited" nuclear war. But they had overlooked the effects
of smoke from forest fires and buildings ignited by nuclear explosions, as Sagan
was soon to realize. While visiting Ames for the last ECHO meeting in May
1982, Sagan talked with Pollack and Toon about the recent article by Paul
Crutzen and John Birks in the environmental science journal Ambio on climatic
effects of smoke from nuclear war.^" Pollack soon arranged to use Ames's Cray
supercomputer to run climate simulations using both smoke and dust effects.
On 6 April 1982 Richard Turco mentioned the Crutzen and Birks article at a
NAS special meeting on climatic effects of nuclear war, where he presented the
findings of the Ames team on dust effects. He said that results from the new
model, including smoke and dust effects, should soon be forthcoming.

In the first year and a half of the Reagan Administration the new aggres-
sive nuclear policies of the United States government caused great worry among
many citizens. The anti-nuclear movement dramatically picked up steam, includ-
ing the nationwide Nuclear Freeze movement, from 1981 to 1982. Jonathan
Schell wrote a powerful and very influential series of articles in the New Yorker,
published in 1 982 as the book The Fate of the Earth. In the politically polar-
ized climate surrounding the administration's decision to put forward-based
Pershing II nuclear missiles in NATO countries in Western Europe, dramatically
shortening the Soviet Union's perceived response time window, the Reagan Ad-
ministration perceived much anti-nuclear activism as disloyal. Thus, when mem-
bers of the Ames team, most of whom were federal civil servants as employees
of NASA, began to publicize their results, pressure was exerted from the top
down, through the NASA administration, to put a stop to the work. In the fall
of 1982, at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, Jim Pol-
lack was scheduled to report on latest results of the Ames study on smoke and
dust from nuclear war. He was pressured by both the director and assistant di-
rector of NASA Ames the day before the meeting to cancel the talk.

Pollock and Sagan decided, instead, to plan a peer review meeting of their
findings for 22-26 April 1983 at Harvard.^' Their idea was to hold a scientific
peer review meeting, closed to the public and press, to make clear that the study
(now known as TTAPS from the initials of its authors) was not motivated po-
litically and was being judged by the scientific community based entirely upon

The Po5/-Viking Revolutions 123

its scientific credibility. The meeting produced much productive scientific criti-
cism and fine-tuning but basically affirmed the conclusions of the TTAPS
study.^^ The revised manuscript was submitted to the journal Science on 4 Au-
gust 1983 and published there on 23 December^^ Their basic conclusions were
that, under almost all imaginable scenarios of nuclear exchange above a few
hundred detonations, the smoke and dust would be sufficient to block out al-
most all sunlight for months, years, or even decades. The "nuclear winter" re-
sulting would be sufficient to cause the extinction of most life forms on Earth,
certainly of all human life. The only way to prevent such an irreversible trag-
edy, many concluded, was to cease any thought of war-planning scenarios in
which either side hoped to "prevail" over the other. A large segment of the pub-
lic was convinced that both sides must reduce their nuclear arsenals to fewer
than a thousand warheads as soon as possible; otherwise, even an accidentally
escalating nuclear exchange could very quickly pass the threshold above which
the nuclear winter result was inevitably triggered.

Meanwhile, in September the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air flight
007, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, when the commercial passenger plane
accidentally strayed into Soviet air space. Cold War rhetoric was turned up to
even a higher level; in response to the deteriorating political climate, the TTAPS
group scheduled a public presentation of their results early, at a conference on
the "World after Nuclear War," in October 1983, at the Washington, D.C.,
Sheraton Hotel. That same month the made-for-TV film The Day After aired on
nationwide television, with a panel discussion afterward on nuclear policy and
the effects of nuclear weapons, including Sagan, Elie Wiesel, and Henry Kis-
singer. (The film was very frightening, yet it did not take into account at all the
compounding effects of nuclear winter.) In all the years in which NASA Exobi-
ology funds produced scientific findings with high-profile public relations di-
mensions, few moments, surely, matched this one for historical drama, political
impact, and direct implications for the human future. A week after the TTAPS
paper appeared in Science, on New Year's Eve, Carl Sagan gave a high-profile
"lay sermon" to thousands of people packed into the Cathedral of St. John the
Divine in New York City, imploring humanity to respond to the nuclear winter
findings by raising its consciousness and adopting whatever activism was nec-
essary to prevent such a tragedy from occurring. Gone was the lighthearted, wise-
cracking Sagan of the "Johnny Carson Show" in the years leading up to Viking.
In his new incarnation Sagan still had an ego that could provoke his opponents,
but the seriousness of the consequences of his science had produced a change;
emerging was a spokesman for science who would soon advise the Pope and
the Soviet Central Committee on the scientific and policy implications of the
nuclear winter study.

In an article from this time, summarizing the past efforts of the NASA
Exobiology Program and describing the changes in emphasis that had occurred
since Viking, the new Exobiology head, Donald DeVincenzi, listed the currently
supported research agenda (table 5.1). One can see the influence of both the

124 The Living Universe

Table 5.1 Donald DeVincenzi, 1984 Summary of Exobiology Scientific Goals

These goals include the study of:

1 . Biogenic elements (including studies of abundance of CHONPS'' in the
universe, including in interstellar molecular clouds)

2. Chemical evolution (including Miller-Urey type simulations, organic com-
pounds on meteorites [Cronin],'' possible role of clays in synthesis of oli-
gomers [Cairns-Smith and Hartman])'^

3. Origin of life (including sequence-specific templating [Orgel],^ origin of
genetic code [Woese],'' studies on microspheres [Fox] and similar struc-
tures, origin of metabolic systems)

4. Organic geochemistry (including search for microfossils [Schopf, Knoll],
diagenesis of organic matter, modeling of ancient climates [Pollack,
Kasting]* for correlation with properties in the geologic record)

5. Evolution of higher life forms (including Alvarez asteroid extinction work,
Raup and Sepkoski on periodicity of mass extinctions and possible cause)

6. Solar system exploration and SETI (detection of life and life-related
organics beyond the Earth [Biemann], instruments, especially GC, to
send to Titan and to comets, SETI program)

^ CHONPS stands for carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur.
'' John Cronin first received NASA funding, $45 thousand per year, in 1975; it increased steadily
every year, reaching $ 11 5 thousand by 2000. Cronin to Stride, personal communication, 6 Decem-
ber 2000.

' A. Graham Cairns-Smith to Strick, personal communication, 28 December 2001 and 8 January
2002; Hyman Hartman to Strick, personal communication, 3 February 2002. Hartman was funded
from 1980 to 1987 at $40-50 thousand. In addition, Cairns-Smith and Hartman received funds to
organize a July 1983 meeting in Glasgow on Clay Minerals and the Origin of Life.
■^ Leslie Orgel to Strick, personal communication, 1 1 January 2002; Orgel received funding for this
work steadily from 1969 to 2001, totaling $4,652,528. In addition, he had a contract for $56,896
from 1969 to 1977 related to the Viking GCMS project.

' Carl Woese to Strick, personal communication, 14 January 2002. Woese's funding rose steadily
through these years; in 1977 he received $73 thousand and by the early 1990s $100 thousand or
more per year.

f James Kasting and James Pollack were at first co-PIs on this grant; by the late 1980s Kasting had
taken it over and has been funded continually "on the order of $60-80K per year since that time."
Kasting to Strick, personal communication, 19 December 2001.

"Life in the Universe" conference as well as the ECHO meetings; DeVincenzi
prominently included "evolution of higher life forms," stating that this research
was being pursued through "projects dealing with the possible influence of solar
and galactic events on this process. These include further characterization of
rock samples showing an anomalously high iridium content at the Cretaceous-
Tertiary boundary. Current efforts are also being focused on examining the re-
lationship between the proposed impact events (which may have caused these
anomalies) and biological extinctions. They include developing models of at-
mospheric dust dispersion, which may have caused profound changes in light

The Poi-/- Viking Revolutions 125

intensity and temperatures, and also a more careful examination of the extinc-
tion record itself."^"*

Using cautious scientific language DeVincenzi only hinted obliquely at
the controversial nature of the impact theory debate and the periodic extinctions
discussion; the work being supported was the Alvarez group, the ECHO meet-
ings, and Raup and Sepkoski. He was hinting even more obHquely at the highly
politically charged studies of "atmospheric dust dispersion," sharply reducing
"light intensity and temperatures;" NASA was still supporting Turco, Toon,
Ackerman, and Pollack in their modeling studies on these topics, despite the
Reagan Administration's profound distaste for the resultant nuclear winter
theory 7^ Pollack had begun, in 1981, to collaborate as well with James Kasting
on modeling climates on the ancient Earth, using many of the same techniques
developed for analysis of the K-T asteroid impact and the nuclear winter scenario.

Scientific as well as political attacks were directed against the nuclear win-
ter theory. The debate pushed along dramatically the development of complex
computer modeling of climate. By 1990 the TTAPS group published a follow-
up paper that responded to many of the technical critiques.^* Their results showed
a somewhat less severe climate scenario than in the 1983 study; they argued,
however, the basic phenomenon of nuclear winter remained an inescapable con-
sequence. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in Rus-
sia in 1991 and the less aggressive nuclear stance of the first Bush Administration
moved the issue out of the headlines. Some might argue (Sagan for one, Turco
for another) that it was the danger of nuclear winter which was one important
factor starting the process of moving U.S. government policy away from that
of the early Reagan years. ^^

In his summary of NASA Exobiology's goals DeVincenzi seemed to have
internalized quite a bit of the logic of the Gaia theory, stating, for example, that
"there is a clear relation between the processes which are believed to have oc-
curred on the primitive Earth with those that are occurring today, where the
Earth's biota is, in effect, acting as a modulator of processes occurring on a global
scale. It is just this relationship which is becoming more and more prominent
as a major new NASA thrust for the future. ... It is the clarification of this
relationship which will lead to the most fundamental breakthroughs in under-
standing ... the origin of life."^^

Exogenous Delivery of Organic Compounds

In August 1986 the Space Sciences Board of the NAS held a meeting in
Snowmass, Colorado, which began a series of meetings through 1988, leading
to the 1990 publication of The Search for Life's Origins?'^ The Planetary Biol-
ogy and Chemical Evolution Committee was chaired by Chuck Klein and in-
cluded Hyman Hartman, John Cronin, George E. Fox, Andrew Knoll, John Oro,
Toby Owen, Norman Pace, David Raup, Norman Sleep, Jill Tarter, David Usher,
and Robert Woodmansee (with Sherwood Chang, Mitchell Sogin, and Carl

126 The Living Universe

Woese as consultants), the majority of them NASA Exobiology grantees. The
report expressly set out to reconceptualize exobiology in light of new findings
from 1986 spacecraft to Halley's comet, new consensus that the primitive at-
mosphere was probably not reducing (pp. 80-81), theories that hydrothermal
vents could serve as good sites for prebiotic synthesis (p. 81), the possibility of
clays as initial genetic systems/sites of synthesis (pp. 85-86), findings of the
ECHO Report (including the K-T asteroid theory, pp. 100-101), RNA world
issues, among other things. The authors concluded that "at the very least, research
on the possible effects of large-body impacts has sensitized the scientific com-
munity to think more in terms of cosmic influences on Earth systems."^" A very
similar note was struck by Chris Chyba in 1992: "Missions to Halley's comet
[turned exobiology thinking outward from Earth, but] perhaps just as important
was the psychological effect of the suggestion made in 1980, that a large impact
played a role in the extinction of the dinosaurs. After this provocation impacts'
possible role throughout Earth's history began to be examined in earnest."^'

Indeed, it was in July 1986, just as the NAS SSB Committee was begin-
ning this reassessment process, that Carl Sagan proposed to his new grad stu-
dent Chris Chyba that Chyba "attempt a quantitative analysis of the role of
infalling organic compounds from comets, meteorites, and cosmic dust in the
origin of life." This became Chyba's doctoral thesis. ^^ Chyba quickly joined the
stable of up-and-coming talent funded by Exobiology, now under the direction
of John Rummel, who took over from DeVincenzi in 1986. According to
Rummel, Chyba's work was strongly attacked by Stanley Miller and his former
student Jeff Bada. But the "shouting matches" between Miller and new ap-
proaches, in Rummel's view, could often be scientifically fruitful. He cited both
Chyba's work on exogenous delivery of extraterrestrial organics and Everett
Shock's work on the possibility of prebiotic organic synthesis at hydrothermal
vents: "Chris had some very good results about how much cosmic dust had been
raining down on the planet for a long time and the potential for that to bring in
organics. Stanley was of the opinion that anything that brought in organics that
wasn't the Miller-Urey experiment was somehow disrespectful. ... It was funny
to hear Stanley tell you about how anything brought in from outer space would
be destroyed by deep sea vents anyway and so why should we bother with that
sort of thing and of course so was all the stuff that was produced in the atmo-
sphere. . . . Jeff Bada and Stanley to some degree, their disagreements with
Everett Shock about the potential for hydrothermal vent systems to generate or-
ganic compounds has always been an interesting one. That's more of the same."^^

Thus, as new approaches developed in Exobiology under Rummel's watch
and as Miller-Urey type experiments seemed less relevant or out-of-date to much
of the new younger generation of researchers, the Miller school, centered at the
University of California San Diego (UCSD) and nearby Scripps Institute of
Oceanography, fought back to maintain a prominent place in the field. By 1992
its members had organized a large research group with five main principal inves-
tigators (Pis) and their twenty students and had negotiated with NASA to create

The Post-Wiking Revolutions 127

Table 5.2 Exobiology Budget History (in Thousands of Dollars)

Program Component Fiscal Year

1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992

Exobiology 4,340 4J05 4,908 (5,050) 5,076 5,423 6,294

baseline R&A 4,742^

Exobiology — — — — — — 925

NSCORT

Exobiology flight 0 434 550 760 657 1,100 2,760
(SSEX, GGSF)

SETI Microwave 1,574 2,175 2,403 2,260 4,233 11,500 12,250
Observing Project

Total 5,914 7,314 7,861 7,762" 9,966 18,023 22,229
" After "Appropriations Integrity."

a new entity called NSCORT (NASA Specialized Center of Research and
Training).^"* Table 5.2 shows steady growth in expenditures during the years of
Rummel's tenure as Exobiology chief, including the first year of NSCORT
funding. ^^

The principal investigators in the Exobiology NSCORT group are Stanley
Miller at UCSD, Leslie Orgel at Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Gustaf
Arrhenius and Jeffrey Bada at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and Gerald
Joyce at Scripps Research Institute. From its creation it has continued to be
funded in the one million-dollar per year ballpark, under the aegis of Michael
Meyer, Rummel's 1992 replacement as the fourth Exobiology chief in the "Dy-
nasty." NSCORT was designated a "virtual center," with the purpose of encour-
aging more collaboration among the five senior researchers and twenty students
spread over four separate institutions. In this sense it pioneered the "virtual cen-
ter" idea that NASA expanded so dramatically with the creation in 1997 of the
virtual Astrobiology Institute, linking research groups all over the country.
J. William Schopf at UCLA is a supportive reviewer of the NSCORT group
(Miller was a member of his 1979-1980 PPRG). One of its most central func-
tioning institutions has been a biweekly journal club for the twenty students, to
which the senior Pis "specifically are 'disinvited.'"^^

Many of the Miller/Bada points of view, such as their profound skepti-
cism about "ventists" having anything relevant to say about origin of life, are
staked out clearly in the book coauthored in 2000 by Bada (with Christopher
Wills), The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup. Here Bada also
defends the possibility of a reducing atmosphere on the primitive Earth to a

128 The Living Universe

degree not supported as enthusiastically anywhere outside San Diego.^'The
NSCORT group is fairly negative in its attitude toward Cairns-Smith's "clay
genes" origin scenario; however, its members think plausible J. D. Bemal's ear-
lier, more modest suggestion that clays may act as catalysts upon which the first
organic polymers may have been built up from their monomers.^^ Although Bada
allows more credit for these approaches than Miller (he says some kind of "ge-
netic takeover" scenario was probably likely, even if not from clay genes), es-
sentially, they are still the "analytikers" that Lynn Margulis labeled them in 1973;
less precise, controlled approaches still smack to them of the messy "gemischer"
approach.

The RNA World

In the fall of 1982 a paper was published announcing the discovery that
certain small RNA molecules in the protist Tetrahymena were capable of acting
as enzymes, not just information-carrying molecules.^' One of the authors, Tom
Cech of the University of Colorado, was soon contacted by Cliff Brunk of the
UCLA biology department, a member of Schopf 's research group. The Schopf
group wanted Cech to come down to UCLA and give a talk on the "ribozymes,"
as the catalytic RNA molecules had been dubbed, because of the discovery's
extremely suggestive implications for the origin of life. Cech gave the talk on
16 November 1983; according to him, "I didn't even know what origin of life
research was at the time! I was unfamiliar with the key work of Leslie Orgel,
also of Manfred Eigen. The UCLA visit was an important learning experience
for me, making me aware that there were these earlier ideas and I'd better know
about them. Prior to then, I hadn't thought any farther back than 'a primordial
organism.' ... Is the work important for origin of life? The consensus is 'yes,'
the truth is 'we don't really know.'"^"

Cech and his work received an enthusiastic reception; soon word spread
through the origin of life research community. There was cautious optimism that
this might validate the "RNA World" scenario suggested by Leslie Orgel (see
fig. 4.3) fifteen years previously, that is, that the chicken-egg paradox (of how
to get a protein catalyst-DNA information system up and going, when both parts
depend upon the other in order to be made and to function) could be resolved if
a simpler molecule such as RNA could possibly be an earlier stage, if it could
only be shown that RNA could act as an enzyme, in addition to its known
information-carrying functions. Schopf recalls that attendees did not just walk
out immediately seeing Orgel's RNA World had come into full bloom; rather,
"Folks, I think, were a bit skeptical about the RNA World implications. Remem-
ber that in the origin-of-life business, 'seemingly good ideas' are plentiful; what
takes the time and effort is to show that a 'good idea' has a counterpart in real-
ity. For the RNA World, that came slowly, gradually, and somewhat later.""

Nonetheless, within a year or two, caution had been largely replaced by
enthusiasm; there was a tremendous blossoming of research into the possibili-

The Po5/- Viking Revolutions 129

ties of the RNA World scenario.'^By 1989, a remarkably short seven years af-
ter the first papers independently discovering ribozymes, Cech and Sidney
Altman (leader of the other group, at Yale) were awarded the Nobel Prize in
chemistry for the work. Perhaps the most significant reason the work was thought
so important was its origin of life implications.

By 1991, however, hardly had the Nobel checks gone into the bank, when
serious problems began to emerge, such as Cech hints at in his quote. Gerald
Joyce of Scripps Research Institute had been a student in Orgel's lab in the late
1960s when Orgel first proposed the RNA World idea. Now he published an
article explaining that the questions left unanswered about how to get to an RNA
World were still so great that it was not any kind of answer to the original ori-
gin of WftP He began researching the pre-RNA world, or how to get to RNA
to begin with and how protein synthesis could have evolved using RNA.

The problems with prebiotic synthesis of RNA were numerous. For one
thing, the Miller group meticulously documented that the half-life of ribose, the
key sugar needed, was very short under prebiotic conditions; it simply would
not remain around long enough, even if formed, to react with other molecules
to form nucleosides and nucleotides, let alone an RNA polymer. Leslie Orgel,
in a more recent review, concluded there are still at least eight major difficul-
ties in the chemical steps needed to form RNA.^** These have been summarized
by biochemist John Cronin as follows:

1 . Ribose is only a minor product among many sugars produced by simple
prebiotic reactions, e.g., the formose reaction.

2. Ribose is not very stable.

3. Phosphate is possible in only low concentrations in prebiotic oceans due
to the insolubility of calcium phosphate.

4. There are apparently no good prebiotic routes to the pyrimidine nucleo-
sides.

5. Positionally specific phosphorylation of nucleosides is difficult pre-
biotically.

6. How could nucleotides have been activated for polymerization? A ther-
modynamic problem.

7. A paradox: In ribozymes considerable chain length is required for repli-
cative fidelity, but fidelity could only be realized in short chains by an
error-prone primitive ribozyme.

8. The concerted effects of some or all of the above.'^

According to Cronin: "The skepticism about an RNA world is not skepticism
toward the possibility that in the course of its early evolution life went through
a period in which RNA catalysis (ribozymes) was important or maybe even
dominated biochemistry, but rather toward the idea that this biochemistry was
primitive, i.e., represented first life. It is widely believed now that there were
necessarily preRNA worlds."'* Stanley Miller's group, for example, "has been
interested in fashioning a pre-RNA that does not rely on the traditional

130 The Living Universe

pyrimidines and purines. . . . Another possible pre-RNA that the NSCORT re-
searchers have been studying is peptide nucleic acid."^^ Woese's fruitful line of
investigation, tracing back toward the last common ancestor and its very early
form of 16s rRNA, also guarantees RNA study a prominent place in future stud-
ies.^^ Thus, an RNA World has now become a significant chapter in the story of
the origin of life on Earth. The very first chapters in that story, however, remain
unknown and the subject of speculation and differing camps of thought.

C/3lthough this survey of exobiology and origin of Ufe ideas since Viking
has not attempted to be comprehensive, it shows clearly that major reorienta-
tions have occurred during the past twenty-five years. The conceptual shifts are
profound fundamental underpinnings of the new, more comprehensive discipline
of astrobiology. In particular, the study of extratertestrial bodies and the effects
of their impact on Earth as well as the study of environmental conditions broadly
and how they coevolve with living systems from the very first origin of those
systems have both moved to the front burner as never before. There is now a
prominent role for catastrophist impact thinking, for thinking about life at ex-
traordinarily high temperatures and other extreme conditions, and for Earth Sys-
tem Science (or Gaia-type ideas, if one prefers) about the tightiy linked evolution
of living organisms and the planet on which they arise. All of these ideas seemed
marginal or even heretical twenty-five years ago.

Chapter 6

TToe ^earchfor Extraterrestrial
Intelligence

V'^rom the beginning of the extraterrestrial
Hfe debate its most exciting and controversial aspect was the search for intelli-
gence.' Unlike microbes, intelligence holds the potential for tapping into the
experience and knowledge of other minds in answering the great questions of
the universe. By the beginning of the Space Age the hypothesis of the Ameri-
can astronomer Percival Lowell that intelligent Martians had built canals on their
dying planet, as well as the debate over unidentified flying objects (UFOs), had
shown just how controversial the subject could be. Still, if a method could be
found for confirming the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, it would leap-
frog theories of the origins of planets and life and go directly to the Holy Grail —
minds similar to or different from ours but capable of contemplating the universe.
With the development of new techniques and detectors in radio astronomy,
such a method became feasible just as the Space Age began. Although it was
not part of NASA's early plans, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
was a logical extension of the search for microbial life and origins of life re-
search. It was only a matter of a dozen years before this logic began inexorably
to work its way into NASA thinking. Once it did, it proved so controversial that
the idea saw a long phase of study, followed by a minimal and then consider-
able research and development program, only to be terminated by congressional
politics with a tiny fraction of the proposed observational program completed.
The story of SETI in NASA is a story of high ideals, internal and external poli-
tics, and ultimate disappointment. But it is a story that must be viewed in the
larger context than NASA and even national politics and whose end has not yet
been written, perhaps even within NASA.

Origins of NASA SETI: The Study Phase, 1969-1982

During the first decade of its existence NASA showed little interest in
searching for interstellar communications. The space agency naturally had a
greater interest in the immediate prospects for exobiology in our solar system,

131

132 The Living Universe

and, as we have seen, embraced the direct search for Ufe in the solar system
very early in its history. The paper "Searching for Interstellar Communications,"
published in Nature in 1959 by the physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip
Morrison one year after the founding of NASA, held little interest for an agency
focused on planetary exploration. Even Frank Drake's first radio search for such
communications in 1960, poetically known as "Project Ozma," passed virtually
unnoticed at the space agency. A 1961 meeting on interstellar communication,
sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences at Green Bank, West Virginia,
did include two NASA employees, astronomers A. G. W. Cameron and Su-Shu
Huang, both experts on planetary system formation. But their participation was
based on individual interest and expertise, not NASA planning. Still, a meeting
in 1963 on "Current Aspects of Exobiology," held at the Jet Propulsion Labora-
tory (a NASA-funded contractor administered by the California Institute of Tech-
nology) and devoted almost entirely to planetary exploration, included Drake's
paper "The Radio Search for Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life." This signaled a
potentially broader interpretation for exobiology; it was not, however, one that
NASA was yet ready to incorporate into its programs.^

NASA's first publicly expressed interest in SETI came in 1970, not from
planetary exobiologists but from an expert in space medicine, an area of respon-
sibility at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. The person who would
play a pivotal role in launching and sustaining a SETI program within NASA
was John Billingham, a physician who had worked on the Apollo program space
suits and now headed the Biotechnology Division at Ames. Billingham had ob-
tained his medical degree from Oxford in 1954 and had spent six years at the
Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine at Famborough, where he re-
searched physiological stresses imposed on aircrews under conditions of high
speed and high altitude, especially heat stress. His work on aviation medicine
brought him frequently to the United States, where he represented the Royal
Air Force at scientific meetings and joint meetings with the U.S. Air Force. His
interest in space medicine was spawned by Sputnik, which prompted him to sub-
mit to the British Interplanetary Society several papers on the control of cabin
conditions for spacecraft and the protection of astronauts from the severe con-
ditions on the Moon. These published papers brought him to the attention of
NASA, and in 1963 he became chief of the Environmental Physiology Branch
of the Crew Systems Division at Johnson Space Center in Houston. It was here
that he tackled the physiological and medical problems associated with the Mer-
cury and Gemini flights and played an early role in the design requirements for
the Apollo spacesuits.-'

After three years in Houston, Harold "Chuck" Klein invited Billingham
to come to Ames as an assistant chief in the Biotechnology Division of Ames
Life Sciences. Drawn by advanced research and development focus at Ames,
as opposed to the more immediate operational duties in Houston, Billingham
now worked in much the same area but with applications to future spaceflight.
The Biotechnology Division was only one part of Life Sciences at Ames. On

JTte Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 133

the top floor of the Life Sciences Building was the Exobiology Division, which
Klein had headed before taking over as chief of all Life Sciences at Ames. Be-
cause they were located in the same building, BiUingham ran into these "strange
and interesting people" who were working on chemical evolution and the ori-
gin and evolution of life. Among the forty or fifty people working in the divi-
sion at the time were Cyril Ponnamperuma, Sherwood Chang, and Richard S.
Young.

Through these interactions BiUingham became increasingly intrigued with
extraterrestrial life and was led to the recent book by Joseph Shklovskii and Carl
Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966). "I read it from cover to cover,
and it's one of those things that one remembers very vividly. I sat back and said
'Wow!'" This book in turn led him to the work of Frank Drake, Philip Morrison,
the Green Bank conference, and a half-dozen others. "Then I sat down, and over
a period of some months it began to dawn on me that nobody had asked a key
question. And the key question was, if you were serious about conducting a
search for other intelligent life, how would you do it? . . . how would you do it
if you wanted to make it a really large-scale enterprise? I mean a very thorough
enterprise, instead of a shoestring operation." BiUingham had made a crucial
realization: "In the back of my mind, I guess I also had this notion that, 'Gee,
NASA is supposed to explore space, and here I am sitting in NASA and here
are all these people on the top floor who are studying exobiology, only they're
thinking about microbial life. If there's anything in this business of searching
for intelligent life, maybe one should ask a second question, and that is, if in-
deed there is a way to put together a thoroughgoing approach, is it also pos-
sible that NASA at some future time may actually become interested in adding
SETT to its existing base of scientific activity.""*

Thus were the seeds for the NASA SET! program planted. Before pro-
ceeding any farther, BiUingham took the prudent step of convincing Ames direc-
tor Hans Mark that the subject might be worth pursuing at Ames. But Mark urged
caution; before any major study, a mini-study of the problem of interstellar
communications should be undertaken. This was done in the summer of 1970,
concurrently with a more visible NASA-sponsored weekly lecture series on inter-
stellar communication, also organized by BiUingham. The speakers for the lat-
ter project included Carl Sagan on interstellar communication, A. G. W. Cameron
on planetary systems, Cyril Ponnamperuma on chemical evolution, Ronald
Bracewell on interstellar probes, and Frank Drake on the search strategy with
radio telescopes. The results, published in 1974 under the title Interstellar Com-
munication, documented for the first time in a public way NASA's early
interest in the subject.^

A lecture series was one thing, a NASA program quite another In this
sense Billingham's mini-study took on importance beyond its inconspicuous be-
ginnings. The study produced optimistic results and led to a decision to con-
duct a full-scale study the following summer as part of a summer faculty
fellowship program in engineering systems design sponsored by NASA, Stanford,

J 34 The Living Universe

and the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE). Billingham and
his Stanford colleague James Adams had been running this fellowship program
at Ames since the mid-1960s; the program would run for twenty years and would
be one of NASA's important contributions to education.

For the interstellar communication summer study, with the advice of Hans
Mark, Billingham and Adams now brought in Bernard Oliver. Oliver, an elec-
trical engineer, vice president for Research and Development at Hewlett Packard
and a participant in the famous Green Bank meeting in 1961 on interstellar com-
munication, was Billingham's senior by fourteen years. He, too, would become
crucial to NASA's SETI program. As early as grammar school in Aptos, Cali-
fornia, Oliver was an avid science fiction reader. There, he recalled, "I certainly
got the theme of a populated universe, and the concept of interstellar travel, of
course, is what we all dreamed of in those days." He was a believer in extrater-
restrial life, even though Sir James Jeans was at that time proposing the rarity
of planets and life in the universe. Oliver obtained his degree in electrical engi-
neering from CalTech and Stanford, and went east to work for Bell Labs on
automatic tracking radar. It was during this work, as early as 1950, that he was
astonished to learn by his own calculations that the ten kilowatt powers they
worked with on radar could communicate anywhere in the solar system and with
some further capability might even reach the nearest stars. Oliver left Bell Labs
and went to Hewlett Packard in 1952, but he never forgot the implications of
his calculation. After reading about Frank Drake's Project Ozma in a news maga-
zine, he visited Green Bank and attended the first conference on interstellar com-
munication there in 1961. As president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers (IEEE) in the mid-1960s, Oliver traveled the country giving talks on
interstellar communication and its feasibility, because it was, as he recalled "still
hot on my mind." Already at this time he had the concept of using a large array
of antennas for this purpose. He was one of those invited to Ames for the 1970
lecture series, where he spoke on "Technical Considerations on Interstellar Com-
munications." His enthusiasm, combined with his technical expertise, was in-
fectious: "Once our society becomes convinced of the existence of intelligent
life elsewhere in the galaxy," he wrote, "we will embark on the greatest voyage
of discovery in all our history."*

Thus, Bernard Oliver, "Barney" as his colleagues knew him, became the
technical genius behind what came to be known as " Project Cyclops." Billing-
ham and Oliver made sure that the twenty faculty they gathered from around
the country in the summer of 1971 included those with expertise in details of
antenna elements, receiver systems, and signal processing as well as more gen-
eral problems about the probability of life in the universe and search strategies.
By the end of the summer Oliver and his colleagues had produced plans for a
detector consisting in its final stages of an "orchard" of perhaps one thousand
one hundred-meter antennas covering a total area some ten kilometers in diam-
eter. Cyclops was an ambitious project, but the system had the capabihty of start-
ing out small and building more if the first few antennas detected no signals.

The Search far Extraterrestrial Intelligence J 35

The Cyclops report is important for many reasons, ranging from the tech-
nical to the inspirational. It explicitly set forth the premises that by now were
part of the "orthodox view" of extraterrestrial life proponents: that planetary sys-
tems were the rule, rather than the exception; that many planetary systems would
contain at least one planet in the stellar "ecosphere," where temperatures are
moderate enough to allow an oxidizing atmosphere and liquid water on the plan-
etary surface; that organic precursors of life would form in abundance either
from the primordial atmosphere or from material deposited by carbonaceous
chondrites; that main sequence stars cooler than F5 spectral type would have
lifetimes sufficiently long for biological evolution; and that intelligent life would
evolve in these stellar systems. The report also suggested that we have no way
of knowing the longevity of technological civilizations other than by making
contact with them and that interstellar contact may greatly prolong the lifetime
of races by "sharing an inconceivably vast pool of knowledge." Access to the
"galactic heritage," Oliver wrote, "may well prove to be the salvation of any
race whose technological prowess qualifies it."^

Among the fifteen conclusions of the Cyclops report were that signaling
was vastly more efficient than interstellar travel; that the microwave region be-
tween one and three billion hertz (1-3 gigahertz) was the best place to search
for such signals from the Earth's surface; and that the region between the spec-
tral lines of hydrogen (1420 MHz) and the hydroxyl radical (1665 MHz) was a
natural "waterhole" frequency for communication because there was less inter-
ference from natural radio waves. The report found it technologically feasible
to build a phased array for interstellar communication across intergalactic dis-
tances and concluded that any directed beacon would most likely be circularly
polarized and highly focused ("monochromatic") with spectral widths of one
hertz or less. This last conclusion called for a high-resolution detector, and one
of the major contributions of the Cyclops system was to propose a signal-process-
ing system to analyze the two hundred-megahertz (MHz) bandwidth of the
waterhole with a resolution not exceeding one hertz. Even concentrating on the
waterhole, two hundred million channels would have to be searched. Rejecting
scanning spectrum analyzers and the Fast Fourier Transform as too slow or too
expensive, the report concluded that an optical spectrum analyzer would carry
out the job most efficiently. This scheme, which made use of photographic film,
an optical Fourier Transform, and a high-resolution vidicon tube, would still have
required two hundred optical spectrum analyzers. The cost of the entire ambi-
tious undertaking was six to ten billion dollars over ten to fifteen years. This
cost estimate doomed Cyclops to any development effort in the real world. The
fact that it could start out small and expand later was lost in the several billion-
dollar price tag for the total project. Nevertheless, the Cyclops study marked a
watershed in the application of technical expertise to the problem of interstellar
communications. And, aside from its technical contributions, the Cyclops re-
port came to an important administrative conclusion: that the search for extra-
terrestrial intelligence should be established "as an ongoing part of the total

136 The Living Universe

NASA space program, with its own funding and budget." Toward this end, with
the approval of Mark, in late 1972 Billingham began a Committee on Interstel-
lar Communication.^ By March 1973 the committee had produced "A Program
for Interstellar Communication," Phase A of an Interstellar Communication Fea-
sibility Study. By March 1974 it had a more comprehensive "Proposal for an
Interstellar Communication Feasibility Study." The resulting documents re-
mained unpublished, but briefings by both Oliver and Billingham to NASA ad-
ministrator James Fletcher, chief scientist Homer Newell, and NASA's Office
of Aeronautics and Space Technology (OAST) led to funding of $140, 000 from
the latter in August 1974. Fletcher was supportive; the previous year he had writ-
ten that "it is within the realms of possibility, in fact, likely that technically ad-
vanced civilizations may exist on the planets of distant stars. Communications
with such far-off islands of intelligence may someday be begun, with effects on
man's home planet that can now be only imperfectly imagined."^

With minimal funding in hand, at the beginning of 1975 Hans Mark formed
an Interstellar Communications Study Group consisting of Billingham, astrono-
mers Charles Seeger and Mark Stull, and Vera Buescher. Buescher was "the
planet's first full-time interstellar secretary," as Billingham later put it, "the glue
which held us all together." Others, including Oliver, David Black, and John
Wolfe, remained closely associated with the group. The OAST funding was used
primarily for a series of six SETI science workshops chaired by Philip Morrison,
two further workshops on extrasolar planet detection, and one workshop on cul-
tural evolution. '0 These workshops proved to be another landmark in SETI his-
tory and a critical stimulus to enlisting support by the wider scientific community
(fig. 6.1). It was also during these workshops that the acronym SETI was adopted,
"to differentiate our own efforts from those of the Soviet Union and to empha-
size the search aspects of the proposed program." The Soviets had previously
discussed communication with extraterrestrial intelligence, or CETI, but Billing-
ham and his colleagues were sensitive to the fact that "communicating" was po-
litically more explosive than merely searching. Sober scientists might undertake
the search, but, if it came to communication, a much broader spectrum of soci-
ety needed to participate. That was one issue that need not be addressed in an
embryonic SETI program.

Having considered interstellar travel, robot probes, and electromagnetic
signals, the Morrison report confirmed that radio signals were the optimum
method for interstellar communication. It showed graphically the "free space
microwave window" and the "terrestrial microwave window," indicating the best
frequencies for interstellar communication, taking into account the Earth's atmo-
sphere; these charts would appear repeatedly in SETI literature as justification
for narrowing the frequency dimension of the search. The report also recognized
that the search for signals had to be limited in direction or frequency or both.
Although no consensus was reached on a search strategy, the report gave the
first public discussion of a possible bimodal method for the search, a detailed
look at selected target stars and a broad-brush all-sky survey, which became the

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 137

Figure 6. 1 . Members of the Science Workshops on Interstellar Communication, also known
as the "Morrison workshops," 1975-1976, photographed in front of the Life Sciences
Building at NASA Ames. Front row: Frank Drake, A. G. W. Cameron, Philip Morrison
(chair, holding SETI license plate), Ron Bracewell, Bruce Murray. Second row: Bernard
Oliver, Harrison Brown, Jesse Greenstein, Fred Haddock, Eugene Epstein. John Billingham.
Third row: Bill Gilbreath, Yoji Kondo. Fourth row: Sam Gulkis, John Wolfe, Charles
Seeger, Robert Edelson, Gerald Levy. Back row: Vera Buescher, Mark StuU, H. R. Brockett,
Robert Machol. Their deliberations resulted in the landmark volume The Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence ( 1 977), known informally as the "blue book." (Courtesy SETI
Institute.)

hallmark of the NASA program. As opposed to the optical spectrum analyzer
of the Cyclops report, the Morrison report noted that large-scale integrated cir-
cuit technology had improved so much in the five years since Cyclops that "it
now appears possible to build, at reasonable cost, solid state fast Fourier ana-
lyzers capable of resolving the instantaneous bandwidth into at least a million
channels on a real time basis." This was to be a crucial point that would be the
basis for the NASA SETI hardware. As we shall see in the next chapter, the
studies of 1975-1976 also revived interest in the possible existence of extrasolar
planetary systems and stimulated another NASA/ASEE summer study of a
method for detecting them."

Like the Cyclops report, the Morrison workshops reached a number of
important administrative conclusions. The participants agreed that "it is both

138 The Living Universe

timely and feasible to begin a serious search for extraterrestrial intelligence."
They also argued that the search fell under NASA's mandate:

It is particularly appropriate for NASA to take the lead in the early
activities of a SETI program. SETI is an exploration of the Cosmos,
clearly within the intent of legislation that established NASA in 1958.
SETI overlaps and is synergistic with long-term NASA programs in
space astronomy, exobiology, deep space communication and planetary
science. NASA is qualified technically, administratively, and practically
to develop a national SETI strategy based on thoughtful interaction with
both the scientific community and beyond to broader constituencies.

Accordingly, Hans Mark established a small but formally constituted SETI Pro-
gram Office at Ames Research Center in 1976, within the Extraterrestrial Re-
search Division formed in that year from the Exobiology Division. Headed by
John Billingham, aided by John Wolfe, Mark Stull, Vera Buescher, and Mary
Conners, and made possible by the continuing support of Hans Mark (director
of the Ames Research Center) and Harold Klein (director of Life Sciences at
Ames), this was the first institutionalization of SETI within NASA.

The mention of deep space communications and planetary science in the
Morrison report and the discussion of a bimodal strategy signaled the interest
of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the support of its prospective director, Bruce
Murray, for SETI. Thus, at both JPL and Ames the innovative SETI programs
stemmed from the personal interest and support of the new directors. The inter-
est at JPL developed naturally, since JPL ran the Deep Space Communications
Complex (part of the Deep Space Network) and had expertise in the radio as-
tronomy needed for SETI. But the crucial ingredient was Murray, who, as pro-
fessor of planetary science at CalTech, had participated in the Morrison
Workshop on Interstellar Communication in April 1975 dealing with planet de-
tection. After discussions with the JPL radio astronomy group about what role
JPL might play in SETI, Murray championed a Sky Survey strategy against the
skepticism of the Ames group, which pushed for a more traditional Targeted
Search. In the fourth workshop in December 1975 Billingham and Seeger had
presented a paper on "Ames-JPL Plans" for a detector. By 1977 JPL had a SETI
office, headed by Robert Edelson, generating ideas about how JPL should con-
tribute. Jill Tarter, who would later emerge as the project scientist, joined the
SETI team from the University of California-Berkeley about this time. After
some initial conflict an Ames-JPL partnership emerged that would become a
major feature of NASA's formal SETI program. '^

As with any project, funding was the perpetual problem constantly in the
forefront if any progress were to be made. Thus began the selling of SETI. Out-
look for Space, a report prepared in 1976 by contributors from all the NASA
centers to guide NASA's thinking for the next twenty-five years, viewed inves-
tigations into the origin and existence of life, whether microbial or intelligent,
as an important part of NASA's space objectives through the end of the cen-

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 139

tury. Such statements appear in planning documents only after considerable lob-
bying by proponents. Again, Billingham had played an important role on this
committee, resulting in SETFs first significant appearance in a formal NASA
study at a high planning level. The possibility of increasing the scope of NASA's
exobiology program from the search for microorganisms within the solar sys-
tem to the search for extrasolar planetary systems and radio signals from extra-
terrestrial intelligence — from the confines of the solar system to the entire
cosmos — was a breathtaking leap. But by 1976, the year of the Viking landers
and the bicentennial of the United States, SETI was becoming respectable in
NASA, if only in the smallest of ways.'^

Propelled by the Morrison workshops and emboldened by Outlook for
Space, Billingham and others sought to devise a program that might be funded.
SETI would be significantly unlike most NASA endeavors. It would have no
spacecraft, no launch risks, and no possibility of equipment failure in space. Po-
litical and economic reaUties and the revolution in digital electronics dictated
that SETI would have no Cyclops system with a vast collecting area. Instead,
the embryonic program would use existing radio telescopes to which would be
attached specialized detectors and signal-processing apparatus whose construc-
tion would be the main objective of the funding. The proposed total cost of the
SETI program as calculated in the late 1970s, including five years of research
and development and ten years of operation, would be about one hundred mil-
lion dollars, some 10 percent of the billion-dollar Viking project but roughly equal
to the cost of Viking 's biological experiments.

In June 1979, with the possibility of significant funding on the horizon,
NASA sponsored a landmark conference at the Ames Research Center on "Life
in the Universe," the conference that also played an important role in further-
ing the Gaia concept. With the impetus provided by the Morrison workshops,
NASA by this time had formally adopted a search strategy — the bimodal strat-
egy that not only made sense scientifically but also satisfied the desire of both
JPL and Ames to work on the project. Billingham and Wolfe at Ames and
Edelson at JPL coauthored the paper given at the 1979 conference, the first to
lay out the NASA program in detail. Referring to their "modest but wide rang-
ing exploratory program," the authors described a ten-year effort "using exist-
ing radio telescopes and advanced electronic systems with the objective of trying
to detect the presence of just one signal generated by another intelligent spe-
cies, if such exists." Again the emphasis on detection was significant, since
NASA was not prepared to communicate. JPL would undertake Murray's Sky
Survey at frequencies from one to ten gigahertz (nine billion channels), while
Ames would concentrate with more sensitivity on the Targeted Search among
some seven hundred-plus stars within twenty-five parsecs (eighty light-years)
of Earth. '"^ Its one to three billion hertz encompassed two billion single-hertz
channels.

In their joint paper the Ames-JPL authors characterized the concept of
intelligent life as a hypothesis widely held in the scientific community. They

140 The Living Universe

PROPOSED SEARCH

ALL-SKY SURVEY

NEARBY SOLAR TYPE "5

1 10 100 -■i^

FREQUENCY, GHz

Figure 6.2. Cosmic haystack, showing the search space to be covered by the NASA / Jet
Propulsion Laboratory Sky Survey and the NASA Ames Targeted Search. The Targeted
Search was designed to have greater sensitivity, while the Sky Survey would observe in
more directions and over a broader frequency range. Both were terminated in 1 993, with
parts of the Targeted Search continued by the Project Phoenix sponsored by the SETI
Institute. (Courtesy NASA.)

viewed the hypothesis as resting on two postulates: that life is a natural conse-
quence of physical laws acting in appropriate environments and that a physical
process that occurs in one place (as on Earth) will occur elsewhere. As a practi-
cal matter, the group also adopted the assumption that some fraction of extra-
terrestrials would be "providing an electromagnetic signature we can recognize."
They pointed out that, although many searches had been undertaken with com-
paratively primitive data-processing systems, the NASA system could achieve
a ten million-fold increase in capability over the sum of all previous searches.
And they recommended a major effort to develop the necessary equipment. The
key instrument, known as the Multi-Channel Spectrum Analyzer (MCSA), and
its software algorithms were the heart of the system, the means by which the
"cosmic haystack" could be searched for its "needle." A three-dimensional
graphical representation of the cosmic haystack in this article first dramatically
depicted the magnitude of the task (fig. 6.2). Having examined several spectral
analysis techniques, the group agreed with the Morrison study that "the digital
approach is far superior in terms of capability, flexibility, reliability, and cost."

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 141

Figure 6.3. SETI Science Working Group, 1981. Front row: Sam Gulkis, Eric Chaisson,
Frank Drake (chair), Jill Tarter, Don Beem, Peter Boyce. Back row. Woody Sullivan,
Bernie Burke, Mike Davis, George Swenson, Ben Zuckerman, Jack Welch. (Courtesy
SETI Institute.)

By 1979 the Ames-JPL group had a detailed idea for a coherent SETI program
but not much money to carry it out.'^

During the 1970s NASA had studied the SETI problem; during the 1980s,
the Ames and JPL groups continued the push to implement the recommenda-
tions of the studies. Studies and refinements would continue, notably in meetings
during 1980 and 1981 of a SETI Science Working Group (SSWG), composed
of radio astronomers and engineers who could provide essential independent
review and advice. Headed by John Wolfe of Ames and Sam Gulkis of JPL,
this working group once again confirmed the microwave region as preferable,
endorsed the bimodal strategy, envisaged a five-year R&D effort to design,
develop, and test prototype instrumentation, and examined in more detail the
instrumentation and strategies required (fig. 6.3).'*

In the end, however, no amount of study would get the job done. To con-
vert concepts and discussion into hardware and software required funding. And
before funding was forthcoming NASA still had to overcome skepticism both
from the scientific community and from Congress. In this effort they were not
helped by broader events. Even as the Morrison workshops were under way in

142 The Living Universe

1975, a broad challenge to the basic assumptions of SET! was launched. In par-
ticular, Michael Hart and David Viewing independently argued that, if interstellar
travel is taken seriously and given the immense astronomical time scale avail-
able, the fact that there are no intelligent beings from outer space on Earth is an
observational fact that argues strongly that extraterrestrials do not exist. Given
the age of the universe and the time needed for intelligence to develop. Hart
and Viewing proposed, extraterrestrials should have populated the galaxy. At a
velocity of one-tenth the speed of light, Hart argued, this would have occurred
in a mere one million years. Moreover, the argument required only one space-
faring extraterrestrial civilization. The existence of the thousands proposed by
SETl proponents was implausible because it was unlikely that every advanced
civilization had chosen not to engage in space travel or had destroyed itself in
nuclear war. The bottom line, if this rationale held, was that "an extensive search
for radio messages from other civilizations is probably a waste of time and
money." '^

The "where are they?" argument, minus Hart's conclusions, had been first
casually raised in conversation by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. Known
as the "Fermi paradox," it gathered momentum during the 1970s in parallel with
NASA's plans for a SETl program. By 1979 an entire conference was devoted
to the question of "where are they?" centered on the Fermi paradox. The argu-
ment was elaborated and emphasized especially by physicist Frank Tipler, who
took the extreme position that the logic was so compelling that it was a waste
of taxpayers' money to undertake a search. In 1983 astronomer and science fic-
tion writer David Brin termed the paradox the "Great Silence" and reviewed
the scenarios that might account for it in terms of a modified Drake equation,
taking into account a "contact cross-section" between extraterrestrials and con-
temporary human society.'^

Meanwhile, skepticism in Congress was also proving a hindrance. In early
1978 the program unexpectedly received Senator William Proxmire's notorious
Golden Fleece Award for "the biggest, most ironic, or most ridiculous example
of wasteful spending." Proxmire, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Sub-
committee, with jurisdiction over NASA funds, stated that NASA, "riding the
wave of popular enthusiasm for 'Star Wars' and 'Close Encounters of the Third
Kind,' is proposing to spend $14 to $15 million over the next seven years to try
to find intelligent life in outer space. In my view, this project should be post-
poned for a few million light years." Proxmire noted that there was not a scin-
tilla of evidence for life beyond the solar system, that even if living beings existed
they were so distant that they would be dead and gone by the time we received
a message, and that Earthlings had enough difficulty communicating with one
another. He particularly objected to the costs associated with the JPL Sky Sur-
vey and suggested that "at a time when the country is faced with a 61 billion
budget deficit, the attempt to detect radio waves from solar systems should be
postponed until right after the federal budget is balanced and income and social
security taxes are reduced to zero. After detailed congressional hearings in Sep-

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 143

tember 1978, the Subcommittee on Space Science and Applications of the House
Committee on Science and Technology supported NASA's proposal to initiate
a SET! program. The Golden Fleece had done its damage, however; the House
and Senate Appropriations committees elected not to provide any money. '^

NASA bridled at such criticisms in unusually stark terms. In their after-
math NASA administrator Robert Frosch wrote: "It is a time of the 'golden
fleece' for SETI, and I presume it will be a time of golden fleeces for other things
we try to do. The 'golden fleece' idea, the idea that searches, gropings for knowl-
edge whose purpose we do not understand are silly and some kind of a ripoff,
results from sheer lack of understanding, lack of imagination, and lack of per-
ception of the meaning of the history of the human race.''^"

NASA continued to fund SETI at a subsistence level after 1979 until
thwarted again by Senator Proxmire, who (this time being affected by Tipler's
argument) on 30 July 1981 placed an amendment on the floor of the Senate
which provided that no FY 1982 funds should be used to support SETI. "Three
years ago, NASA requested $2 milhon for a program titled SETI. The idea was
that they are going to try to find intelligence outside the solar system. Our best
scientists say that intelligent life would have to be beyond our galaxy. I have
always thought if they were going to look for intelligence, they ought to start
right here in Washington." Proxmire was clearly peeved that the program had
not been halted three years ago and offered the same arguments to terminate it
finally now. "In this year of all years," he concluded, "we should not fritter away
precious Federal dollars on a project that is almost guaranteed to fail." The
amendment was unopposed, and, during the Joint House-Senate Conference on
NASA's FY 1982 appropriations, Proxmire prevailed, effectively killing all fund-
ing for SETI for 1982. Frank Drake undoubtedly spoke for most SETI scien-
tists when he wrote: "The ultimate irony is that while all of this has been taking
place. Senator Proxmire has been frantically maneuvering to preserve excess
subsidies to dairy farmers. Congress did not want this, but again he prevailed.
The cost to the taxpayer for the excess subsidy, not the basic subsidy, is be-
tween $500,000 and $1,000,000 per day. Every two days enough funds to run
SETI for a year are diverted to this end."2i

Despite this setback, NASA boldly decided to return to Congress for full
funding in FY 1983. The agency was supported by the "decadal review" of as-
tronomy by the National Academy of Sciences, which recommended SETI as
one of seven moderate programs that NASA should implement. Although the
Hart-Viewing-Tipler arguments had precipitated a crisis in SETI thinking, pro-
ponents of the search had counterarguments that convinced many in the scien-
tific community. Frank Drake and Barney Oliver argued that interstellar travel
and colonization were too expensive and that radio communication was vastly
more efficient across interstellar distances. Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan was
among those who argued that, on some interstellar diffusion models, travel would
be slower than Hart envisioned. And astronomer Michael Papagiannis argued
that perhaps the extraterrestrials were in the vicinity of the solar system but

144 The Living Universe

undetected. Although uncertainties abounded in all of these arguments, the SETI
proponents had one major characteristic of Western science on their side: em-
piricism. Philip Morrison expressed it as follows: "It is fine to argue about N
[in the Drake equation]. After the argument, though, I think there remains one
rock hard truth: whatever the theories, there is no easy substitute for a real search
out there, among the ray directions and the wavebands, down into the noise.
We owe the issue more than mere theorizing." This was a call repeated again
and again as the NASA SETI groups sought funding from Congress.22

Back in that world of funding and politics, after activities that included a
discussion between Sagan and Senator Proxmire which emphasized civilizations
rather than science and again with the backing of Hans Mark (now deputy ad-
ministrator of NASA), SETI funding was restored for FY 1983 at the level of
1.5 million dollars. Finally, NASA was ready to begin a sustained research and
development program culminating in an operational system to search for extra-
terrestrial intelligence.

Building the NASA Program: Research, Development and
Inauguration, 1983-1992

With funding at the level of about 1.5 million per year, NASA's Ames
and JPL centers embarked on an intensive program, known initially as the Mi-
crowave Observing Project (MOP) and later, beginning in October 1992, as the
High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS), to build the instrumentation nec-
essary for their respective approaches to search for intelhgent life. Building on
the studies of the past decade, the goal of the Ames Targeted Search Element of
the NASA SETI program was to search for artificial signals from eight hun-
dred to a thousand solar-type stars within about one hundred light-years. Be-
ginning with Arecibo, it would use the largest radio telescopes possible, observe
each star for three hundred to a thousand seconds, and focus on the two billion
channels in the one to three gigahertz region of the microwave spectrum. Be-
cause of practical limitations, it would process twenty megahertz of bandwidth
at one time, necessitating that each star be observed one hundred times to cover
the entire two gigahertz. The six simultaneous channel resolutions would range
from one to twenty-eight hertz. The system would have the ability to detect ei-
ther continuous wave or pulsed signals.

JPL's Sky Survey Element, on the other hand, made no assumptions about
specific preferred targets in the sky but was designed to observe the entire sky
at 1 to 10 GHz with smaller, thirty-four-meter class radio telescopes beginning
with those of the Deep Space Network. Because it had a broader spectrum to
cover (9 GHz rather than 2 GHz for the Targeted Search), the fully operational
system was designed to process 320 MHz of bandwidth at the same time, with
20 Hz channels. The prototype system inaugurated in 1992 was capable of pro-
cessing 20 MHz for each polarization. The Sky Survey observational strategy
was to examine each spot in a tessellated "racetrack" pattern for only a few sec-

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 145

onds at most, resulting in a sensitivity one hundred times less than the targeted
search and losing the ability to detect any pulsed transmissions over time peri-
ods longer than its observation at a single spot. Each mosaic built up a "sky
frame," and approximately twenty-five thousand sky frames would be required
to cover all directions and frequencies, each taking about two hours to com-
plete, for a total of about seven years for the complete survey. The targeted and
sky survey strategies were in many ways complementary; only the observations
would demonstrate which assumptions were best and which technique was most
effective in terms of a successful detection.^'

As envisioned in 1979, the components of both the Targeted and Sky Sur-
vey systems consisted of three chief elements: a wideband dual polarization re-
ceiver and low noise amplifier; a digital spectrum analyzer to break the signal
down into many channels; and a signal processor to search for the intelligent
signals. The heart of the system and the key to its success was the digital spec-
trum analyzer. In 1979 it was envisioned that the spectrum analyzer would be
constructed of modules that could be configured for each of the two search strat-
egies. In fact, as events developed, Ames and JPL developed separate spectrum
analyzers, the Multi-Channel Spectrum Analyzer at Ames and the Wide Band
Spectrum Analyzer (WBSA) at JPL, each suited to the particular needs of its
observing program.

With this general description one can begin to see the daunting problems
that faced the designers who actually had to produce the hardware and software
that would make SETI work. Radio astronomy had never before attempted multi-
channel spectrometers at the scale needed for the SETI search. Standard spec-
trometers had been developed for a wide range of requirements, from 200 Hz
resolution over a band of 40 KHz (for studies of the OH hydroxyl radical emis-
sion), or 20 KHz resolution over a band of 3 MHz (for extragalactic twenty-
one centimeter studies), but nothing approaching the resolution and millions of
channels needed for SETI. The key to the new spectrometer was the advance of
digital technology, and the specific application to SETI was worked out begin-
ning with Alvin Despain of the University of California-Berkeley and Allen
Peterson at Stanford. By 1976 Despain, who had done postgraduate work un-
der Peterson at Stanford, had begun to collaborate with Peterson when they re-
alized that work already under way in digital filter design for other purposes
was applicable to the SETI problem. Work on the design of a 74,000-channel
prototype MCSA with one-half hertz resolution had been begun already in 1977
at the Engineering College Laboratories at Stanford University headed by
Peterson and was built under the immediate supervision of Ivan Linscott. This
prototype, later known as MCSA 1 .0, used wire- wrap technology together with
commercial integrated circuits and was contained in a standard equipment rack
the size of a refrigerator. Field tests of the MCSA prototype detector were con-
ducted from 1985 to 1987, using the twenty-six-meter telescope at Goldstone's
DSS 13. The detection of Pioneer lO's one-watt transmitter at a distance of 4.5
billion miles demonstrated the capabilities of the digital architecture. Beginning

146 The Living Universe

in early 1988, the prototype was further tested at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto
Rico and also used for experiments in radio astronomy.^'*

Faced with the need to scale up this spectrum analyzer by more than a
hundredfold to produce more than fourteen million one-hertz channels, MCSA
2.0 replaced the wire-wrap technology by a customized, very large integrated
circuit chip. Initially designed by students from Stanford, this digital signal-
processing chip was built under contract to NASA Ames by the Silicon Engines
Company.^5 Its basic task was to perform Fourier transforms extremely fast, pro-
viding six simultaneous frequency resolutions ranging from one to thirty-two
hertz. It was the upgraded version of MCSA 2.0, with a redesigned, more accu-
rate signal processing chip on large format, multilayer boards which became
operational at Arecibo on 12 October 1992.

Another crucial component to the SETI system was the method for ex-
tracting an extraterrestrial signal coming through the spectrum analyzer. While
detection of signals from noisy data is a standard problem in communications,
SETI presented a particular challenge because nothing is known with certainty
about the nature of an artificial extraterrestrial signal. The signal detection team
at Ames, headed by D. Kent Cullers, assumed that the signal would consist of
narrowband carriers, single pulses, or pulse trains and designed its signal de-
tection algorithms accordingly. Aside from detecting a continuous wave, the soft-
ware algorithms searched for pulses over the range of 45 milliseconds to 1 .5
seconds. Because the system had to reject any terrestrial radio frequency inter-
ference, this problem was studied extensively by both the Ames and JPL ele-
ments of the SETI project. Finally, because millions of channels were to be
analyzed in real time, great demands were placed on the data acquisition sys-
tem, which was specially designed for the project.^*

As these events unfolded at Ames, parallel events had taken place at JPL.
There Michael Klein (who had taken over from Edelson as head of the JPL SETI
project in 1981) forged a collaboration with the Telecommunications and Data
Acquisition Technology Development Office to use part of the Deep Space Net-
work and to design and build an engineering development model of their sys-
tem, including the Wide Band Spectrum Analyzer, the equivalent of Ames's
MCSA. SETI drove the design of the spectrum analyzer, but the multi-mission
users of the Deep Space Network would share in its use. The purpose of the
JPL spectrum analyzer was in general the same as that of the MCSA, but its
architecture was tailored to the needs of the Sky Survey. The prototype system
used on 12 October consisted of a pipelined Fast Fourier Transform architec-
ture that transformed 40 MHz of bandwidth into 20 Hz channels, for a total of
two million channels. It could also be configured to analyze one million chan-
nels on each of two polarizations. As with the Targeted Search element, the Sky
Survey had its own signal-processing and data acquisition problems to address.^^

In 1985 Ames and JPL entered into a memorandum of understanding de-
lineating the responsibilities of each group. The project underwent definition
reviews in 1986 and 1987, and the formal Program Plan was adopted in March

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 147

1987.2^ In 1988 the Project Initiation Agreement was signed by NASA head-
quarters. Finally, with funding for FY 1989, SETI took on the status of an ap-
proved NASA project beyond the "Research and Development" phase and began
"Final Development and Operations," to be completed by the year 2000 at a
total cost of $108 milhon. Administratively, SETI had gone from a few people
within a division at Ames in 1976 to two project offices in two NASA centers
with a combined staff and subcontractors of about sixty-five in 1992. Fiscally,
its annual budget had risen from a few hundreds of thousands of dollars in the
early 1970s to over ten milhon in the 1990s. Conceptually, its strategy had been
honed and reduced to pohtically realistic proportions since the visionary Cy-
clops days.

At NASA headquarters the SETI program had spent most of its hfetime
(since 1978) in the Life Sciences Division. But in 1992 the Senate Appropria-
tions Subcommittee directed NASA to rename the project the "High Resolu-
tion Microwave Survey" (HRMS) and move it to Space Science at headquarters,
where it became the first element in the Solar System Exploration Division's
"Toward Other Planetary Systems" (TOPS) program designed to detect other
planetary systems (see chap. 7). The move was not popular among the TOPS
team; as one member later wrote, "This was somewhat like trying to protect
the life of a star witness in a high-stakes criminal case through a quick change
of identity and a move to another state."^^ Nor was it popular among SETI sci-
entists, who were apprehensive that it could be misconstrued as evasive action,
as indeed it eventually was.

As the HRMS program began on 12 October 1992, the chief of the SETI
office at Ames (since SETI's inception NASA's lead center for the project) was
John Billingham, with Barney Oliver as his deputy chief. Jill Tarter (also lo-
cated at Ames) was the overall project scientist. Tarter had come to Ames in
1975 on a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Research Council, having
received her Ph.D. degree under Joseph Silk at Berkeley working on gas in large
galaxy clusters and doing some of the earhest work on "brown dwarfs," substellar
objects intermediate in mass between a star and planet. Her interest in SETI be-
gan while she was still a graduate student, when Stu Bowyer introduced her to
the Cyclops report and invited her to join Berkeley's shoestring SETI program,
known as SERENDIP She arrived at Ames in time to become involved in the
last two of the Morrison SETI workshops, and, when her NRC postdoc expired,
John Billingham hired her to help with the budding NASA SETI program.

By choice, however. Tarter was not a civil servant and bridled at bureau-
cratic restrictions. She preferred to work out of Berkeley and brought in her own
support money for SETI. This allowed her to travel extensively on various ob-
serving projects. As she recalled: "Early on I knew the best thing that I could
do for the project was to do a lot of observing in a lot of different ways and try
to understand the physical universe and what it looked like at high resolution,
because that's where we were trying to build instruments to search. We really
didn't know, when you got real granular on the astrophysical sources, what they

148 The Living Universe

looked like. If you started looking at masers with finer and finer resolution, do
you see interesting things or, in fact, is there some lower limit to the width of a
natural feature? Indeed, it looks like about 300 Hz. So we went for designing
systems that could detect signals that are more narrow band than that, and think-
ing that if we found it, we'd either find a new [extraterrestrial] technology or
we'd find a whole new branch of astrophysics." During the 1980s she became
increasingly involved in the NASA SETI program, playing key roles in both
the science and politics.^°

Another crucial event during the 1980s was the beginning of the nonprofit
SETI Institute, founded in 1984 with Frank Drake as its president and Tom
Pierson as its executive officer. The SETI Institute was bom out of the need to
stretch funds for SETI. As SETI funding remained steady in the early 1980s,
employees became more expensive, and the amount of R&D which could be
done actually decreased. Many SETI employees were adjunct faculty at nearby
universities, and almost half of NASA's 1 .5 million SETI funding went to over-
head charges at the universities. Enter Tom Pierson, who worked for the San
Francisco State University's Research Foundation, managing research grants and
contracts. Pierson had been handling the SETI contract for astronomer Charles
Seeger (brother of the singer Pete Seeger). Given the problems SETI was hav-
ing in stretching money, Seeger set up a meeting with Billingham and Oliver in
June 1984 to discuss how to remedy the situation.

By September Oliver hired Pierson to study how SETI's fixed funds could
be stretched. The conclusion of Pierson's study was to recommend forming a
nonprofit institute that took adjunct faculty contracted from universities with
high overhead rates and provided a professional home at a lower overhead rate,
leaving more money for research. Unlike the Space Telescope Science Institute
and the Lunar and Planetary Institute, NASA played no role in founding the SETI
Institute, which was formed as a nonprofit corporation. On 20 December 1984
Pierson, Drake, Andrew Fraknoi, Jack Welch, and Roger Heyns held the founding
board meeting for the SETI Institute. Among those who joined the institute im-
mediately was Jill Tarter, who remained half-time with Berkeley. By 1992, when
the NASA SETI program began observations, the institute had attracted some
twenty members with about seven million dollars of grants from NASA and NSF,
among others. Not only did it prove an efficient way to use funding, but mem-
bers of the institute (unlike civil servants) were unencumbered in lobbying Con-
gress for money, an important consideration. Over the years the SETI Institute
provided essential support in logistics, funding, and education about SETI and
exobiology in general. As we shall see, it soon proved crucial to the continua-
tion of SETI.^i

In June 1990 SETI advocates were taken by surprise when Congressmen
Ronald Machtley (D-R.I.) and Silvio Conte (R-Mass.) introduced a motion on
the floor of the House of Representatives to remove all funding for the NASA
SETI program for FY 1991. Machtley declared, "we cannot spend money on
curiosity today when we have a deficit." We have survived for fifteen billion

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 149

years without knowing whether extraterrestrials exist, he said, and we can sur-
vive a few biUion years more without knowing. Machtley suggested that, if Con-
gress approved SETI, it might adopt a (Search for Congressional Intelligence
(SCOTI) program. Conte concurred that "at a time when the good people of
America can't find affordable housing, we shouldn't be spending precious dol-
lars to look for little green men with misshapen heads." If one wanted to find
out about aliens, he suggested, one could spend "75 cents to buy a tabloid at
the local supermarket." Conte concluded by introducing into the Congressional
Record several tabloid articles on UFOs and extraterrestrials.^^ Neither Machtley
nor Conte had been briefed on the subject, but the members of the Senate Ap-
propriations Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs, NASA, and Independent Agen-
cies had been. With the support of the Senate Subcommittee chair, Barbara
Mikulski (D-Mass.) and Senator Jake Gam (R-Utah) the full amount of 12.1
million dollars was appropriated. "In recommending the full budget request of
$12,100,000 for the SETI program," the Senate report stated,

the Committee reaffirms its support of the basic scientific merit of this
experiment to monitor portions of the radio spectrum as an efficient
means of exploring the possibility of the existence of intelligent extra-
terrestrial life. While this speculative venture stimulates widespread in-
terest and imagination, the Committee's recommendation is based on
its assessment of the technical and engineering advances associated with
the development of the monitoring devices needed for the project and
on the broad educational component of the program. The fundamental
character of the SETI program provides unique oppormnities to explain
principles of such scientific disciplines as biology, astronomy, physics,
and chemistry, in addition to exposing students to the development and
application of microelectronic technology.^^

In May 1991 Senator Richard Bryan (D-Nev.) assaulted SETI during Senate
Authorization Committee deliberations. Although the funding made it through
for FY 1992, it was an ominous warning of things to come.

Meanwhile, Billingham was attending to another facet of SETI. From early
on he realized that the societal implications of SETI could be profound. One of
the two splinter workshops from the 1975-1976 Morrison meetings was "The
Evolution of Intelligent Species and Technological Civilizations," chaired by
Nobelist Joshua Lederberg and held at Stanford. Fifteen years later, on the eve
of the first NASA SETI observations, Billingham organized and chaired a full-
scale series of workshops, dubbed "CASETI" (Cultural Aspects of SETI). With
his penchant for interdisciplinary interaction, in 1991-1992 Billingham gath-
ered a diverse group of two dozen scholars to consider the question, no longer
academic, "What would be the cultural, social, and political consequences if
NASA's HRMS project were to succeed at detecting evidence of and extrater-
restrial civilization?" The resulting publication was a pioneering study that dem-
onstrated how the social and behavioral sciences could add crucial insight to

150 The Living Universe

SETI while at the same time demonstrating the complexity of the problem and
its richness for further study. Not least, it showed how SETI had the capacity to
bridge many disciplines even outside the natural sciences.^"'

In the face of numerous political hurdles, on 12 October 1992, symboli-
cally the quincentennial of Columbus's landfall in the New World, the NASA
HRMS was inaugurated amid considerable fanfare. On that date the 305-meter
radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, began the Ames Targeted Search, while
the 34-meter antenna at the Venus station of the Deep Space Communications
Complex at Goldstone in the Mohave Desert began the JPL All-Sky Survey (fig.
6.4). After more than fifteen years of sometimes sporadic planning and sixty
million dollars of research and development, SETI was finally on the air.

The New World Has Been Canceled: Congress and SETI

The observations begun at both Arecibo and Goldstone in 1992 were to
mark the beginning of an extended enterprise. Over the lifetime of the project
the systems used there would be replicated or moved among observing sites by
a Mobile Research Facihty, consisting of a truck with spectrum analyzers and
associated equipment. The Targeted Search would use telescopes in the United
States, Australia, and possibly France, and in 1995 the 140-foot telescope at
Green Bank was planned to become dedicated to SETI. The Sky Survey would
use the Deep Space Network telescope in Tidbinbilla near Canberra, Australia,
as well as Goldstone and the California Institute of Technology's Owens Valley
Radio Observatory in California.

Despite the elaborate plans and high hopes, it was not to be. Senator Ri-
chard Bryan, a freshman Democrat from Nevada, had during FY 1992 and 1993
unsuccessfully introduced amendments to terminate SETI. On 22 September
1993 he offered an amendment to the NASA appropriation bill for FY 1994 to
ehminate all $12.3 miUion in funding for the SETI program. By a vote of seventy-
seven to twenty-three the Senate concurred. In a press release issued the same
day from his office, Bryan was quoted as saying: "The Great Martian Chase
may finally come to an end. As of today, millions have been spent and we have
yet to bag a single little green fellow. Not a single Martian has said 'take me to
your leader,' and not a single flying saucer has applied for FA A approval. It may
be funny to some, except the punch line includes a $12.3 million price tag to
the taxpayer" The same press release noted that Bryan had successfully elimi-
nated Senate funding for the program in 1992, when the Senate Commerce Com-
mittee voted eleven to six in favor of his amendment to cut funding, and the
full Senate concurred. According to Bryan, "To avoid the cut, NASA simply
renamed the program from the original Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
(SETI) to 'High Resolution Microwave Survey.'" Bryan left no doubt of his
pique at his perception of what had happened, having either forgotten or being
unaware that the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee had directed the name
change when SETI became part of the TOPS program in 1992: "This is a hor-

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 151

Figure 6.4. Inauguration of the targeted search portion of the NASA SETI program with
the thousand-foot radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, on Columbus Day, 1 2 October
1992. Project Manager Dave Brocker in the control room is coordinating the simultaneous
beginning of observations with the Deep Space Network telescopes in California for the
sky survey portion of the search. Outside project scientist Jill Tarter lectures the public in
front of the telescope dish. (Courtesy Seth Shostak.)

rendous case of bureaucratic arrogance that somehow by simply renaming the
program NASA can avoid the cut. . . . NASA wants to spend more than $100
million and they have got to get the message that this program doesn't make
the final cut."^^

While many have wondered at Bryan's motivation for leading the fight
to terminate SETI, he clearly played to his voting constituents when he wrote:
"Only in Washington, D.C., is $100 million considered small change. This is a
lot of money, and, frankly, I think this money could better be left unspent, which
means we don't have to borrow as much and add to the debt. It really is that
simple." It is possible that Bryan's motivation, playing to the voters and saving
money, really was that simple. In any case, on October 1 a House-Senate con-
ference committee approved the Senate plan, which included one million dol-
lars for program termination costs. Recalling the SETI program's inauguration
only a year earlier, one writer in the New York Times remarked, "It was as though
the Great Navigator, having barely sailed beyond the Canary Islands, was yanked

J 52 The Living Universe

home by Queen Isabella, who decided that, on second thought, she'd rather keep
her jewels. ^^

The termination of the taxpayer-funded SETI program must be seen in
the context of other congressional action at the time. There is no doubt that in a
climate of rapidly rising federal deficits Congress was looking for budget cuts.
In the same session Congress had failed to kill two other NASA programs, the
much maligned Space Station, which received the full $2.1 billion funding the
president requested, and the $3 billion Advanced Solid Rocket Motor program.
In light of the failure to make these cuts, some SETI proponents saw the termi-
nation of the much smaller (and therefore politically less supportable) SETI as
a sacrificial lamb. Drake noted that one space shuttle launch cost $1 billion —
"a century worth of SETI research" — while others noted that Stanford had just
received a federal grant of $240 million for research on antimatter. Some saw
the difference as the "giggle factor," a subject open to ridicule no matter how
important. John Pike, of the Federation of American Scientists, noted that aliens
were a frequent subject of the notorious National Enquirer tabloid and offered
another theory: "The political problems SETI has demonstrate the way in which
a member of Congress, in an irresponsible grab for headlines, can do serious
damage to a program." One thing is clear: unlike the Superconducting Super
Collider canceled in the same session of Congress, SETI was not terminated
for bad management or cost overruns. One cannot, however, discount spillover
bad feeling from the Hubble Space Telescope, then returning unfocused photo-
graphs due to a problem with its mirror, an embarrassment that better manage-
ment might have caught. ^^

It should also be kept in mind that NASA overall came out of the con-
gressional session in relatively good shape: the budget bill for FY 1994 (which
began on 1 October 1993) provided less than NASA requested but more than
many researchers expected. Overall, NASA received $14.5 billion, $200 mil-
lion more than 1993. Included in this amount was an increase of $207 million,
to $1,784 billion for space science, out of which SETI would have been funded.
Despite the elimination of SETI and the cuts to a few other programs, NASA
management could not have been too unhappy with its overall budget. Seldom
does a government agency obtain funding for all its programs.^^

The effect at the SETI level, however, was immediate. On 12 October 1993
Wesley Huntress, associate administrator for space science, wrote to Dale
Compton and Ed Stone (directors of Ames and JPL, respectively), "Consistent
with congressional direction, you are instructed to terminate the High Resolu-
tion Microwave Survey (HRMS) immediately." The directors were ordered to
issue termination notices to contractors immediately, to provide a plan within
one week to terminate the program within two months, but to preserve the hard-
ware for potential use by others. The NASA SETI program was dead. Congress
allowed one million dollars for termination costs, and NASA provided an addi-
tional million from FY 1993 funds in recognition of the real termination costs.^^
The provision to preserve the SETI hardware for future use offered a glim-

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 153

FiouRE 6.5. SETI pioneers shown when the program was still headquartered at NASA
Ames, 1 989. Left to right: Vera Buescher, Charles Seeger, Jill Tarter, Frank Drake, Bernard
Oliver, John "J.B." Billingham. (Courtesy SETI Institute.)

mer of hope that many years of research and development could be salvaged if
funding could be found elsewhere. Although JPL's Sky Survey ended because
it made use of the telescopes of the government-funded Deep Space Network,
the Targeted Search was under no such constraint. Suddenly, the SETI Institute,
which until now had played a supporting role, was crucial to the very existence
of SETI. The institute was located only a few miles from the Ames Research
Center. Targeted search personnel, including Billingham and Oliver, moved to
the SETI Institute (Tarter and others were already there) and began to consider
the possibility of private funding, which had a long if sporadic history of sup-
port for astronomy. The SETI Institute, after all, was located in the heart of Sili-
con Valley, and Barney Oliver had a long association with its oldest and most
respected company, Hewlett Packard. Billingham, Tarter, Oliver, and Drake be-
came fund raisers (fig. 6.5), and by December 1993 the institute had commit-
ments of $4.4 million to continue a reduced-scope project with private funds.***^
Among the contributors were David Packard, William Hewlett, Paul Allen (co-
founder of Microsoft), Gordon Moore (cofounder of Intel), and Mitch Kapor
(founder of Lotus Development Corporation). Thus was Project Phoenix bom,
rising from the ashes of the NASA project. Its first observations were carried

154 The Living Universe

out in February 1995 at the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia, later with the
NRAO 140-foot telescope at Greenbank (a few hundred feet from Frank Drake's
original observations for project Ozma), and at Arecibo whenever it could ob-
tain telescope time. Even as Project Phoenix continued, but not content with
sporadic telescope time, at the turn of the millennium the SETI Institute was
deeply involved in planning a dedicated "Allen Telescope Array," funded by Paul
Allen and his former Microsoft colleague Nathan Myhrvold. And an interna-
tional consortium was designing an even more ambitious "Square Kilometer
Array."

Although NASA had given SETI a major boost with its ten-year research
and development program and had operated the world's flagship SETI effort
for one year in 1992-1993, SETI survived after the loss of its chief patron. Not
only did Project Phoenix continue the NASA project; other projects more lim-
ited in frequency and targets were carried on around the world. Especially no-
table were the Planetary Society program at Harvard and in Argentina, and the
University of California-Berkeley Project SERENDIP, which had first piqued
Jill Tarter's interest in SETI. Millions of ordinary citizens signed up for the
SETI @ home project, crunching SERENDIP data on their home computers, and
the SETI League coordinated thousands of others to use their own radio dishes
to form an amateur SETI network. Both these projects testify to the continuing
popularity of the search. Whether popular or scientific, SETI's proponents ar-
gued that the question was too important to be sidetracked by politics or lim-
ited funding. Although the U.S. Congress proved unwilling to invest in such a
long shot as extraterrestrial intelligence, national interest and human fascina-
tion with the subject suggests that, if a signal were actually found requiring a
long-term funding effort to understand, NASA and Congress would once again
be interested. In this sense the history of NASA and SETI may once again be-
come intertwined in the future.

Chapter 7

The ^earchfor Planetary
Systems

C^ti

'Ithough NASA was very quick to
latch onto Mars as a target for exobiology, the search for planetary systems was
another matter. Compared to the stars, Mars was our next-door neighbor, an at-
tainable goal for spacecraft. The search for planetary systems, by contrast, re-
quired new or improved ground-based techniques before one could even
contemplate a search by spacecraft. And, although NASA did fund some ground-
based astronomy in support of its Mars missions — ironically, Lowell Observa-
tory was one of its primary beneficiaries — the National Science Foundation
(NSF) had long been considered the government patron for telescopes on the
surface of the Earth. Nevertheless, NASA eventually took up the challenge —
and sooner than one might have predicted.

The search for planetary systems at NASA arose in three successive but
overlapping contexts: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) in the
1970s, the expansion of planetary science in the 1980s, and studies in the 1990s
which coalesced into the program known as the "Astronomical Search for Ori-
gins." What began as workshops and ad hoc discussions among small groups
of scientists in the early 1970s ended a quarter-century later in some of the most
complex programs NASA had ever conceived, involving large government-
university-industry teams that produced detailed designs for real space missions.
Unlike Mars missions, these spacecraft could not travel to their distant destina-
tions but were designed to search for planetary systems from the vicinity of Earth.
Not by accident, their goal of looking for Earths and unveiling our origins gen-
erated tremendous public interest. Planetary systems were portrayed as an inte-
gral part of cosmic evolution and thus an essential step in the search for life — and
our place in the universe.

Early Discussions: Planetary Systems and NASA SETI

NASA's earliest official interest in other planetary systems arose out of
its program to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. After all, if one were going

155

156 The Living Universe

to search for intelligence in outer space, it would almost certainly be on the sur-
face of a planet, unless one posited exotic life such as portrayed in Fred Hoyle's
novel The Black Cloud. The existence of extrasolar planets was one of the cru-
cial elements of the Drake equation, an essential parameter on the way to life.
The 1971 NASA Ames summer study of a system for detecting extraterrestrial
intelligence, headed by John Dillingham and Bernard Oliver, contained a small
section on planetary systems, which concluded that theoretical considerations
pointed to a large number of planetary systems but that the actual observation
of such systems was at the very limits of detectability. For observational evidence
the authors did seize on the American astronomer Peter van de Kamp's announce-
ment in 1963 of a possible planet around Barnard's star and several other bor-
derhne cases, but the stronger argument was that the nebular hypothesis predicted
planet formation as a normal part of stellar evolution. Similarly, the series of
lectures which Bilhngham organized at Ames during the summer of 1970 in con-
nection with the embryonic SETI program had included only a theoretical dis-
cussion by A. G. W. Cameron.'

It is therefore not surprising that, as NASA's interest in SETI grew by the
mid-1970s, experts were called in to assess the methods for detection of other
planetary systems. The results of these discussions were reported in the pioneer-
ing "Morrison Report," The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (1977), and
were backed up by more detailed NASA reports. Such discussions were only
the first of many that over the next quarter of a century would place NASA at
the forefront of planetary system research, even though the early discoveries of
actual planets in the 1990s were not a direct result of NASA programs. The goal
of the workshops, which notably concentrated on observational techniques rather
than theories of planetary formation, was "to define how observations might shed
some light on the frequency of low-mass companions to stars. "^

As the Viking spacecraft were approaching Mars and as the United States
was approaching its bicentennial, two Extrasolar Planetary Detection Workshops
were held under the auspices of NASA as part of its SETI investigations. The
first convened in March 1976 at the University of California-Santa Cruz and
the second two months later at NASA Ames, where the SETI project was mak-
ing slow progress under John Billingham. The chair of the workshops was Jesse
Greenstein, an established professor of astrophysics at Caltech, known for his
pioneering work on the interstellar medium and stellar evolution. Not only was
Greenstein "a very dominant scientific figure, a person with grand vision, and
very smart," he also had a personal interest in planetary systems stemming from
his own research. The executive secretary was David Black of NASA Ames.
Black was much younger; only a few years earlier he had completed his doc-
toral work on meteorites at the University of Minnesota under Robert Pepin,
which led to his interest in the primitive solar nebula and solar system forma-
tion. As a postdoc in 1971, he had argued that Peter van de Kamp's data on
Barnard's star fit best if it were surrounded by two or three planets not orbiting
in the same plane. ^

The Search for Planetary Systems 157

Already at these early meetings a remarkably full complement of plan-
etary detection techniques was discussed. The participants realized the extreme
difficulty of the direct detection of an extrasolar planet by the light it reflects
from its parent star. The difference in absolute visual magnitudes of Jupiter and
the Sun, they noted, was 21 magnitudes (from 5 for the Sun to 26 for Jupiter),
corresponding to a difference in brightness of 250 million between the two. Any
attempt to find even a large planet around another star would be "washed out"
by the brightness of the star. Nevertheless, the workshop tackled many possible
approaches. Bernard Oliver, of future SET! fame, discussed "apodized" optics
on a space telescope, the use of masking to block out some of the star's light.
The problem could be made more tractable by using infrared (IR) wavelengths
where Jupiter was only 4 orders of magnitude dimmer than the Sun; the work-
shop therefore suggested that a space system for infrared interferometry should
be studied. Infrared observations could also be used to detect protoplanetary sys-
tems, extended disks of gas and dust that have a much larger area than the planets
subsequently formed. Several participants discussed IR techniques, including
Ronald Bracewell, a Stanford electrical engineer who had written on extrater-
restrial intelligence and was thus inspired to invent better methods for planet
detection."*

Of more immediate promise were the "indirect" methods, which detected
the motion of a star due to a planetary companion, either back and forth in our
line of sight (radially) or across our field of view (tangentially). Among these
methods George Gatewood (of the Allegheny Observatory) and Kaj Strand (of
the Naval Observatory) represented the classical "astrometric" community, the
van de Kamp school, which had already used long-focus refractors and claimed
detection of tangential stellar motion due to one or more planets around Barnard's
star. The problems with this method were daunting. The displacement of the
Sun due to Jupiter, as viewed from five parsecs, was only one milliarcsecond
(a thousandth of an arcsecond), and the effect of the Earth was a thousand times
smaller than that (one microarcsecond). The technology at the time might give
three milliarcsecond accuracy after a year's observation, the workshop noted,
but the method would take at least ten years and was on the very edge of de-
tectability, even for Jupiters orbiting the nearest stars less massive than the Sun.
At a special meeting convened at the Naval Observatory between the two planet
detection workshops, astrometrists concluded that improvements in accuracy
could result from the new charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors on ground-
based telescopes, that ground-based optical interferometry might give fifty
microarcsecond accuracy, and that space-borne telescopes might yield micro-
arcsecond accuracies. The problem was that such technologies, with the excep-
tion of CCDs, would take decades to develop.^

As an extension of the classical astrometric method, Frank Drake discussed
photoelectric astrometric techniques, while others discussed new techniques us-
ing optical, radio, and infrared interferometry.

The other major indirect approach to planetary detection was the less-

158 The Living Universe

developed but ultimately more successful technique of "radial velocities." As
with the astrometric methods for detecting tangential motion of a perturbed star,
the radial velocity method had daunting challenges. Jupiter causes a reflex mo-
tion of the Sun of about 12 meters per second, with a period of twelve years,
and the Earth causes the Sun to move only about 0.09 meters per second. By
comparison, the radial velocity systems then in use — for example, by Roger Grif-
fin at Cambridge University — yielded accuracies of only 1,000 meters per sec-
ond (1 km/sec). Griffin argued, and the workshop agreed, that accuracies of 10
meters per second were achievable, though they worried about noise due to sur-
face motions of the star. For the latter reason the workshop was very interested
in the work of American astronomers Robert Dicke and Henry Hill observing
the surface pulsations of our Sun.

Despite the challenges, the conclusions of the workshop, as expressed in
the final SETI report, were upbeat. "The prospects of increasing our confidence
concerning the frequency and distribution of other planetary systems are good,
if we are willing to invest the effort," Greenstein and Black concluded. "As a
consequence of the Workshops, several novel approaches to the problem have
come to light, as have potential improvements to classical means of detecting
planets."*

Among the promising new techniques that Greenstein and Black men-
tioned in their summary was interferometry, a method routinely used in the 1970s
with radio telescopes. By measuring incoming radio waves at several separated
telescopes and then combining the two signals, astronomers could resolve and
measure objects as if a single large telescope were being used. The method re-
quired meticulous detail in combining the waves but was more easily used with
radio telescopes because radio waves were much longer than optical waves. Un-
fortunately, in order to find planets or their effects, one needed to observe in
the optical or infrared region. At the urging of Billingham, a few weeks after
the Extrasolar Planet Detection Workshops associated with SETI and five years
after Billingham and Ohver had conducted Project Cyclops as a Stanford / NASA
Ames summer study. Black conducted his own summer study in the same se-
ries to design a ground-based optical interferometer. "Project Orion," which was
meant to build on the ideas of the Planet Detection Workshops, sought to apply
new technology to develop a telescope that would increase the accuracy of
astrometric measurements some ten to fifty times. Among the twenty-three par-
ticipants were Bracewell, the expert on interferometry; Gatewood, the expert
on astrometry; and Krzysztof Serkowski, an expert on radial velocity techniques.
"We not only reviewed the evidence for other planetary systems, which was es-
sentially non-existent at the time," Black recalled, "we also went to potential
ways in which you could go out searching for what were the limitations on the
various techniques, star spots, photometric noise, things of that nature." Out of
these discussions the technique that emerged for the most focused study was a
long baseline interferometer that sought direct detection of the planet's light.
While the Orion design study team realized that the resulting "Imaging Stellar

The Search for Planetary Systems 159

Interferometer" was perhaps ahead of its time, it nevertheless recommended that
a program to search for planetary systems, with its own budget and funding,
should be included in NASA activities.^

These recommendations received a further boost at a NASA-sponsored
workshop on planetary systems conducted in late 1978 and early 1979, in which
Black again played a prominent role and which was again designed to take an-
other step forward in planet detection techniques. With support from William
E. Brunk at NASA headquarters, Black ran a small program in the late 1970s
which funded Gatewood, Serkowski, and a young new player, Mike Shao at MIT,
to work further on planet detection. All three and Jesse Greenstein, among about
twenty others, contributed to the 1978-1979 workshops whose goal was to "be-
gin to put together the scientific underpinning of what might be called a pro-
gram." The workshop singled out six conclusions: (1) a scientifically valuable
program to search for other planetary systems can be conducted with ground-
based instrumentation; (2) significant gains in the accuracy of existing ground-
based techniques can be made with modest application of current or near-term
state-of-the-art technology; (3) existing telescopes are not currently a limiting
factor for the accuracy of ground-based techniques; (4) none of the currently
planned space-based systems is adequate for a comprehensive detection program,
including NASA's Space Telescope and the European Hipparcos satellite; (5) a
comprehensive program to detect planetary systems must use a multiplicity of
techniques and instrumentation; and (6) a comprehensive effort to detect plan-
etary systems will yield invaluable scientific results. In light of these findings,
and with a view toward building a program, the workshops made four recom-
mendations: (1) high-accuracy radial velocity studies of solar-type stars should
be carried out with existing telescopes; (2) observational studies should be made
of the Sun to study the effects of surface motions on radial velocity techniques;
(3) speckle interferometry techniques should be used to search for planetary com-
panions to binary stars; and (4) the development and testing of new instrumen-
tation should be carried out as soon as possible.^

Workshops were one thing, but putting together a program supported by
NASA was quite another. In doing so, the planet hunters had to confront practi-
cal political problems. They wanted to "sever the umbilical cord between SETI
and planet detection" because SETI was at this time running into political prob-
lems with Senator Proxmire and the Golden Fleece Award. "It was at this point
that we thought this was clearly a scientific endeavor," Black recalled, "not that
SETI isn't, but [planet detection is] something you are measuring physical phe-
nomena and you can tie to astrophysics." But then the problem was to find a
home at NASA: "the only way you were ever going to get things like missions,
which is of course the coin of the realm when it comes to NASA, was to get it
fully embraced within a program. It slowly began."'

In trying to persuade NASA to pick up planet detection even as a fledgling
program. Black and others ran into a common problem for new disciplines: the
planetary scientists saw planet detection as astrophysics, and the astrophysicists

160 The Living Universe

viewed it as planetary science. Black made presentations to NASA headquar-
ters and also to the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Planetary and
Lunar Exploration (COMPLEX), arguing that "you are never going to under-
stand the origin of this planetary system, which is a key part of what planetary
is about, if you don't have this evidence [about other planetary systems]." Even-
tually, in a crucial meeting in 1980 with Ed Weiler, Brunk, and Angelo "Gus"
Guastaferro, who headed planetary science at NASA headquarters, Guastaferro
decided that planet detection would find its first home in planetary science.
Weiler declined to commit funds, and "this went back and forth. Guastaferro
basically almost slammed his fists on the table and said, enough of this, plan-
etary will take it, and he got up and walked out. So that's how planetary detec-
tion got its planetary program." But it would not be the last time that planet
detection had to seek a home in NASA. Black lobbied in other ways too:
by writing a paper in Space Science Reviews and giving a review talk at the
American Astronomical Society meeting the same year. "So gradually, I think
there was more and more visibility and acceptance taking place in the science
community that this was not only something worth doing but in fact not just a
field full of loonies, but it was technically becoming possible to actually do this
job."'"

Another practical problem to confront was the level of funding. As George
Field, director of Harvard's Center for Astrophysics, wrote in the foreword to
the 1978-1979 workshops: "Few astronomers would be likely to take issue with
the idea that some effort be expended in this direction. However, in view of the
many competing claims on the research funds available, the questions of how
much effort should be expended and when become critical ones. The answers
depend on one's assessment of the chances of success, of the significance of
the findings (whether positive or negative), and of the long-term prospects for
more detailed observations of any planetary bodies that are detected.""

It was therefore in the context of SETI that all three NASA-sponsored dis-
cussions of planetary systems took place in the 1970s — the 1976 Greenstein
workshops that fed into the Morrison SETI report, the 1976 Project Orion sum-
mer study, and the 1979 Black and Brunk workshop. It was at another SETI
meeting — the NASA Ames conference on Life in the Universe, convened by
John Billingham in the summer of 1979 — that Black summarized the results of
these three studies. '^ He concluded that improvements to both ground-based
astrometric and radial velocity techniques, giving them the capability of detect-
ing planetary systems, were possible and inevitable. In the case of astrometry it
was not yet clear which technique would win out as the most efficient and ac-
curate for a routine observational program, but interferometry with either one
or two telescopes seemed promising. '^ Black found "little question" that radial
velocity techniques would be improved to one meter per second necessary to
detect planetary systems. As for space-based systems. Black made the prescient
remark that the upcoming NASA Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) mis-
sion, while not searching for planetary systems, "might provide unexpected re-

The Search for Planetary Systems 161

suits," as indeed it did with the discovery of circumstellar material that might
be interpreted as protoplanetary systems. Black was less optimistic about the
capabilities of other space systems on the drawing board: the Space Telescope,
while representing a vast improvement over Earth-based imaging, was not good
enough to image planets, and the milliarcsecond astrometric capability of the
Space Telescope and the European Space Agency satellite (later named Hip-
parcos) was not promising for detecting planetary systems. Both spacecraft were
launched in the early 1990s, experienced early difficulties, but went on to per-
form flawlessly. But neither found any planetary systems.

There is thus no doubt that NASA's interest in the search for planetary
systems was inspired by SETI in its early years. Precisely because of this asso-
ciation, it also had to battle the same political ridicule as did SETI and all en-
deavors associated with the search for extraterrestrial life. It is a telling sign of
the times that at the beginning of the 1979 Ames meeting on Life in the Uni-
verse, NASA administrator Robert Frosch felt compelled to defend not only the
search for life but also the general pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The
meeting, he remarked, "comes at a time in which we seem to have a faltering
in global and national interest in knowledge for its own sake. We have become
hyperpractical and are expected to explain the use of things we do not under-
stand, before we understand them."''' Intellectual risk taking, he argued, is an
essential part of any groping for knowledge. The whole nature of science is
"making errors, finding them, and disposing of them." In the search for plan-
etary systems there would indeed be many errors and false starts, but, as the
decade of the 1980s began, NASA had at least made a start.

Planetary Science Extends Its Realm

Although SETI had provided the context for the first discussions of plan-
etary systems within NASA and although planetary systems would continue as
a significant part of future SETI discussions, it was the better-established (and,
in some opinions, more reputable) planetary sciences that would sustain the idea
through the 1980s. As we have seen, it was in planetary science that planet de-
tection found its first home at NASA. As SETI struggled with its own funding
problems, during that time the planetary science community would carry the
search for planetary systems "from the study phase to a level in which a pro-
gram could be contemplated."'^ Both intellectual and practical reasons drove
NASA's involvement. There was no doubt that the existence of planetary sys-
tems was a problem of the highest importance, the indispensable requirement
for the existence of life beyond Earth. From the practical viewpoint NASA, like
most government agencies, was always looking for new projects to push the
frontiers of exploration (according to advocates) or to perpetuate itself (accord-
ing to cynics). As spacecraft had been successfully dispatched one by one to
the planets of our solar system during the 1970s and 1980s, NASA now sought
more worlds to conquer. Both through its own committees and the advisory

162 The Living Universe

capacity of the National Academy of Sciences, it sought to extend the realm of
the planetary sciences from our solar system to other planetary systems.

NASA sought this extension at a time when planetary exploration was in
crisis. The golden era of solar system exploration, from Mariner 2's first flyby
of Venus in 1962 to Voyager 2's final encounter with Saturn in 1981, was over.
Already in the mid-1970s the resources for planetary exploration were in steep
decline (fig. 7.1). Erratic funding and higher mission costs caused some to call
into question the very survival of the planetary program at NASA. Under these
circumstances, in 1980 Thomas A. Mutch, NASA's associate administrator for
space science, recommended a fundamental review of NASA's planetary pro-
gram. In the fall of that year administrator Robert Frosch obliged by establish-
ing the Solar System Exploration Committee (SSEC) as a subcommittee of the
NASA Advisory Council. Its report, published in May 1983 as Planetary Ex-
ploration through the Year 2000, focused tightly on space missions and barely
mentioned the search for planetary systems. In doing so, it followed the lead of
the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Planetary and Lunar Explo-
ration (COMPLEX), which had produced several reports that, while briefly plac-
ing solar systems studies in the context of planetary systems, made no
recommendations to study them.'*

Yet by 1986 an "augmented program" of planetary exploration also
authored by the SSEC included an entire chapter on planetary systems, com-
plete with recommendations. It was the knowledge of these recommendations
before publication which triggered NASA's request for another COMPLEX study
in 1985, specifically to include planetary systems. Planetary science managers
at NASA knew that, if the process of extending the realm of planetary science
to other solar systems were to succeed, the National Academy of Sciences,
through the Space Science Board of its National Research Council, was an essen-
tial ally. From the beginnings of NASA the relationship with the Space Science
Board had always been uneasy. Although NASA was not required to seek the
advice of the council through its Space Science Board, for new programs and
large projects the weight carried by an independent review of this National Acad-
emy body was often essential to success in arguing for funding.'^ Thus, the rec-
ommendation of COMPLEX regarding a program of research on other planetary
systems was crucial.

The resuhing COMPLEX report was everything NASA could have hoped
for. Couching its report in terms of "a new opportunity for planetary sciences,"
the committee found that a coordinated program of astronomical observation,
laboratory research, and theoretical development to study extrasolar planets and
their stages of formation would be "a technologically feasible, scientifically ex-
citing, and potentially richly rewarding extension of the study of bodies within
the solar system." COMPLEX recommended to NASA's Office of Space Sci-
ence and Applications that it initiate systematic observational planet searches
using both astrometric and radial velocity (Doppler) techniques and, furthermore,
that it study young stars for possible circumstellar material that could indicate

1,500

1,000

o
a

z
o

500

\ .^

_J I I L

J l.,_l__J 1 I 1 L I, I 1 L.._J I L-

1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

FISCAL YEAR

Figure 7.1. Space science funding by category. The decline in planetary exploration funding
{second plot, lower right) in the mid-1970s is evident in this plot from Planetary
Exploration through the Year 2000: A Core Program (May 1983). Life science funding
{bottom plot) was holding steady, but physics and astronomy in general were on the upswing.

164 The Living Universe

solar systems in various stages of formation.'^ One year later the National
Academy's independent "decadal review" of astronomy (the "Bahcall Report")
also gave major impetus to planetary systems science by identifying the field
as a key area for scientific opportunity in the 1990s. Likening the problem of
finding a planet to "trying to find from a distance of 100 miles a firefly glow-
ing next to a brilliant searchlight," the reviewers concluded that optical or in-
frared ground- and space-based interferometers could survey hundreds of stars
within five hundred light-years and detect Jupiter-mass planets. They also noted
that such planets would produce velocity shifts in their parent stars "that should
be detectable with sensitive instruments on the large ground-based telescopes
to be built in the 1990s."''' Thus, the mid-1980s were a turning point, as both
committees of NASA and the National Academy took the study of planetary
systems very seriously.

What had happened in the intervening few years to change the attitude
toward planetary systems? One problem was that the search for planetary sys-
tems had simply been too expensive and too technically challenging. The 1986
NASA SSEC report (now chaired by David Morrison, a planetary scientist at
the University of Hawaii and a student of Carl Sagan) described "missions of
the highest scientific merit that lie outside the scope of the previously recom-
mended Core Program because of their cost and technical challenge."^'' Three
years did not make them less so, but, meanwhile, an astonishing discovery
heightened awareness that real science could be done on the subject. The ser-
endipitous discovery was made by NASA's Infrared Astronomical Satellite
(IRAS), a joint project of the United States, England, and Holland. Launched
in January 1983, the satellite's detector was still going through calibration tests
when it found that Vega was shining ten to twenty times brighter than it should
have at long infrared wavelengths, a phenomenon known as "infrared excess."
Astronomers Hartmut Aumann of JPL and Fred Gillett of Kitt Peak National
Observatory first feared there might be a problem with the detector, but further
reflection and additional observations showed that the source of the infrared ex-
cess was a ring of dust surrounding Vega. In the fall of 1983 they announced
their results in a landmark paper: the first direct evidence outside our solar sys-
tem for "the growth of large particles from the residual of the prenatal cloud of
gas and dust." The discovery was trumpeted on the front page of the Washing-
ton Post and newspapers around the world. Nor was this by any means a unique
phenomenon; by mid-1984 some forty "circumstellar disks," or "protoplanetary
systems," had been found, depending on the interpretation given to the infrared
excess. The discoverers were careful to emphasize that planets had not been
found; instead, "the presumption is that these rings will eventually condense into
solar systems like our own; if so, that makes the Vega phenomenon the first
semidirect evident that planets are indeed common in the universe."^' By late
1984 one of the IRAS objects. Beta Pictoris, had been photographed by a ground-
based optical telescope, producing one of the most famous images in astronomy
which the new report did not fail to reproduce (fig. 7.2). Added to this excite-

The Search for Planetary Systems 1 65

Figure 7.2. CCD image of a disk around Beta Pictoris (1984), early evidence for
circumstellar material perhaps related to planet formation. The disk has been imaged many
times in the last two decades, with indications of a warp that may be caused by planets or
other objects. (Courtesy B. Smith, R. Terrile, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory.)

ment was the announcement of a "brown dwarf' — a substellar object interme-
diate in mass between a star and planet — around the star known as Van Bies-
broeck 8. This implied that planet detection was only a little farther away and
raised planet hunting to a fever pitch by the mid-1980s. Although the latter dis-
covery turned out to be spurious, brown dwarf detections would not be much
longer in coming.

Thus, it was not surprising to find in Planetary Exploration through the
Year 2000: An Augmented Program an entire chapter on the search for new
worlds beyond the solar system. "In the past few years it has become possible
to make a rigorous search for planets around other stars, a search that will ef-
fectively open up a whole new area of science," the report stated. "The SSEC
strongly recommends that such a search should go forward, augmenting limited
ground-based methods by applying telescopes attached to the planned Space

166 The Living Universe

Station." Theories of solar system formation were also advancing, the report
noted, and predicted the existence of numerous planets. The Solar System Ex-
ploration Committee also argued that the search for planets was "a logical part
of the NASA mandate, for it involves several major areas of current space sci-
ence— the nature of the solar system, the mechanisms of star formation, and the
possible existence of life elsewhere in the universe." In particular, the commit-
tee argued that such a search came under its purview because it addressed one
of the division's fundamental goals: to understand the origin and evolution of
our own solar system. ^^

The report concluded with seven recommendations, among them that the
search for planetary systems was an activity properly coordinated by NASA's
new Solar System Exploration Division. It recommended a ten- to twenty-year
program to study about one hundred stars within ten parsecs of the Sun, capable
of detecting Uranus-Neptune mass planets. It further recommended the capa-
bilities of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and its infrared counterpart, the
Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), be used but that a space-based
astrometric telescope be developed, possibly in conjunction with the Space Sta-
tion, for which Black (now at headquarters) had become the chief scientist in
1985. Finally, it encouraged support of the study of a full range of techniques,
including imaging, indirect detection by astrometry, photometry, and radial ve-
locity searches as well as interferometry, whether from the Earth or space.

The 1 986 report laid out an ambitious program, and its authors were par-
ticularly intrigued with the possibilities of an astrometric telescope in space: "It
seems now that the most feasible and best-suited technical approach to plan-
etary detection in the near future is a space-based astrometric telescope which
can measure stellar positions to an accuracy of 10~^ seconds of arc," or 10
microarcseconds, they wrote. "This concept, which is now under study, should
be examined in more detail in order to develop it as a possible experiment for
the Initial Orbital Capability (IOC) phase of the Space Station." The idea for
such an "Astrometric Telescope Facility" (ATF) originated at NASA Ames,
where Black, Jeff Scargle, and Bill Borucki worked on it when it became clear
in the wake of President Reagan's 1984 State of the Union Address that the Space
Station would go forward. But when Ames management balked at taking on such
a large space project, having recently had problems with its role in IRAS, JPL
enthusiastically took over the project and used it as their entering wedge in the
planet detection business. Although Charles Elachi and colleagues at JPL did
Phase A studies for the ATF as a payload attached to the Space Station, both
funding and technical problems prevented the project from proceeding. Among
the technical problems was the realization that a manned Space Station might
not be stable enough to make the extremely precise measurements for astrometry;
the slightest human movement would set off vibrations that would spoil such
delicate observations. There would be no lack of proposals for other astrometric
space telescopes. ^^

As the writing of the Augmented Program was nearing completion, in De-

The Search for Planetary Systems 167

cember 1985, NASA's Solar System Exploration Division (SSED) established
a Planetary Astronomy Committee to provide more specific advice on the fu-
ture of planetary astronomy, including the search for other solar systems. Chaired
by David Morrison at the University of Hawaii, the committee also included
Black, among other planetary science experts from JPL, MIT, and a variety of
other institutions. The committee urged the SSED to recognize a broad man-
date for planetary astronomy, including "the search for other planetary systems
and an improved understanding of the process of planet formation in other sys-
tems, as well as our own." Urging the detection and study of other planetary
systems as a major new initiative for the division, the committee report pointed
out that wider wavelength coverage, improved measurement precision, and the
ability to probe circumstellar environments had created opportunities that would
lead to a new field of "comparative planetary system studies." Ever mindful of
the division's original scope, the report emphasized that this new field would
be of great importance for understanding Earth and our own solar system.^'*

In carrying out its recommendation, the report recommended two strate-
gies: first, that, for the sake of cost-effectiveness, the existing programs of
NASA's Astrophysics Division (especially the Great Observatories, including
the Space Telescope and SIRTF) were central to achieving its goals; and, sec-
ond, that a variety of planet detection techniques be pursued, given that the best
approach was not yet known. Among these techniques were the radial velocity
and astrometric methods as well as space systems with direct-imaging telescopes
and interferometers. An Astrometric Telescope Facility was envisioned for in-
direct planet detection by the motion of the parent star with respect to back-
ground stars and a Circumstellar Imaging Telescope for direct detection of
circumstellar material and (less likely) planets themselves. The strength and
weaknesses of each of these methods were weighed. In this report, for the first
time, planetary systems was envisioned as fully integrated into planetary sci-
ence. The search for planetary systems was "perhaps the most significant new
initiative for planetary astronomy in the 1990s."2^

Although the NASA and National Academy reports were not published
until 1989 and 1990, respectively, by 1988 NASA had seen enough of their con-
clusions to act on the Planetary Astronomy Committee's recommendation to es-
tablish a Science Working Group (SWG) for planetary systems. Geoffrey Briggs,
the head of the Solar System Exploration Division, established this committee,
affectionately known as Planetary Systems Science Working Group (PSSWG),
which temporarily transformed its name to Toward Other Planetary Systems Sci-
ence Working Group (TOPSSWG) from late 1991 to late 1993 and would func-
tion until July 1995. The report of the group, chaired by MIT astronomer Bernard
F. Burke, was issued in 1992, the same year in which planets were confirmed
around a pulsar, a very un-Earth-like star. While pulsar planets could not harbor
life, some enthusiasts argued that, if planets could form in the harsh environ-
ment of pulsars, they could form anywhere.^^

The TOPS group (still known as PSSWG at the time) held its first meeting

168 The Living Universe

in April 1988 and decided that the scope of its work should include not only
the detection of planetary systems but also studies of planetary formation and
evolution as well as the study of circumstellar material in general. The first TOPS
Workshop was held in January 1990 at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Hous-
ton, whose new director was David Black. It resulted in a three-phase program,
which was presented the following August to NASA Associate Administrator
for Space Science, Lennard Fisk. The team recommended that TOPS-0, which
focused on ground-based approaches, begin as soon as possible. They recom-
mended that TOPS-1, proposing the development and launch of a space-based
system, start by the end of the 1990s. The much more ambitious TOPS-2, con-
struction of a major instrument to detect directly Earth-like planets and inten-
sively study them, was so far in the future that no timeline was set.^^ The first
two phases aimed to identify Jupiter-like planets around other stars and charac-
terize their orbits, while the goal of phase 3 was to discover and study Earth-
type planets. Phase 3 hoped to identify the nature of a planet's surface,
temperature, and atmosphere. In retrospect the enunciation of these three phases
of planetary searches was very important because within a few years they would
be incorporated into a real program, known as "Origins."

When the Planetary Systems Science Working Group met in Houston in
early 1990 plans for TOPS-0 drew largely on existing ground-based programs.
The only ground-based astrometric search for planetary systems then in effect
was known as the Multichannel Astrometric Photometer (MAP). The brainchild
of Allegheny Observatory director George Gatewood, who had participated in
the 1976 SETI planet detection workshops, MAP by this time had been used
for five years on the Allegheny Thaw refractor. It had the capability of detect-
ing Jupiter-sized planets around nearby stars but so far had found none. The
other method involved radial velocities, also prominently discussed in 1976 but
achievable then only at the level of one thousand meters per second. By 1 990
Canadian and American groups had observational programs under way with
long-term accuracies of less than one hundred meters per second. Among them
were two astronomers at San Francisco State University (SFSU), Geoffrey Marcy
and Paul Butler, who had been running a radial velocity program with Lick
Observatory's three-meter telescope since May 1990. Groups from Harvard and
Texas, using an instrument dubbed CORAVEL (Correlation Radial Velocities),
which was a more classical radial velocity technique, had been obtaining mea-
surements in the one hundred meters per second range, with hopes of soon reach-
ing twenty-five to fifty meters per second. They had succeeded in detecting a
small object that seemed to be not quite a star and not quite a planet. Thus, radial
velocity technology was edging toward the level of about five meters per sec-
ond, which most astronomers felt was needed to detect Jupiter-sized planets.^^

By the time of the presentation to Fisk at NASA headquarters, however,
the first phase of TOPS was centered on the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna
Kea, Hawaii. The Keck Observatory housed the world's largest telescope, a ten-
meter aperture consisting of thirty-six segmented mirrors, twice the size of the

The Search for Planetary Systems 169

famous five-meter (two hundred-inch) telescope at Mt. Palomar in CaHfornia,
which reigned for more than forty years as the largest, until overtaken by Keck
in 1993. By early 1990 a second ten-meter telescope was being considered for
construction next to the first one, opening up another possibility: using the two
in tandem for optical interferometry. But, in order to build the second Keck tele-
scope, the University of California / CalTech consortium that operated it needed
thirty-five million dollars, one-third of the cost of the telescope. The TOPS group
recommended that NASA fund part of the Keck Observatory telescope as part
of TOPS-0, and the Solar System Exploration Division and Fisk agreed. That
was not, however, the same as getting the funding from Congress; in the end
NASA had to come up with funding internally. NASA officially joined the part-
nership in October 1996, when the second Keck telescope became operational.
Although the NSF had traditionally funded ground-based astronomy, there was
precedent to do so at NASA because of the Infrared Telescope Facility already
on Mauna Kea. Thus, construction of the largest pair of telescopes in the world
was funded in part by the desire to find planetary systems. Eventually, the Keck
telescopes would study protoplanetary systems and discover planets with the
radial velocity equipment of Marcy and Butler. They even offered hope for the
direct detection of massive substellar objects around stars. ^^

TOPS-1, the second phase of the program, considered three proposed space
telescopes, each pushed by separate teams (fig. 7.3). Michael Shao, of JPL,
pushed the Orbiting Stellar Interferometer design, at twenty meters in length
the largest of the three instruments proposed. Robert Reasenberg, of the Harvard
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, proposed the Precision Optical Interfer-
ometer in Space (POINTS). And Black and others proposed the Astrometric Im-
aging Telescope, a free-flying space telescope that was a slightly morphed
version of their ATF. As interferometers, the first two were designed for indi-
rect detection of the motion of a star caused by the gravitational pull of a planet;
the latter (a two-meter-class telescope) could make either direct or indirect de-
tections. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in April 1990, had been touted
as being possibly able to detect planets, but, almost simultaneously with its
launch, Robert Brown and C. J. Burrows showed that the telescope was not ca-
pable of detecting planets, even after its spherical aberration problem was re-
paired. Hubble would return much wonderful data, but it would not confirm the
existence of extrasolar planets.^"

The competition for TOPS-1 heated up in 1991 with news that another
NASA advisory committee was pushing for its own design for a space telescope,
known as the Astrometric Interferometry Mission, which had already been fa-
vorably reviewed in the National Research Council's decadal survey, the Bahcall
Report. The goal stated by the Bahcall Report was a thousand-fold increase in
astrometric accuracy to about thirty microseconds for stars at twentieth magni-
tude. NASA's Astrophysics Division pushed this proposal, while the SSED
pushed one of the three others proposed. The decision was supposed to have
been made at the Woods Hole "shootout" in the summer 1991, where TOPS-0

1 70 The Living Universe

POINTS

Figure 7.3. Three space telescopes proposed for detecting extrasolar planets: The
Astrometric Imaging Telescope, the Orbiting Stellar Interferometer, and the Precision
Optical Interferometer in Space. (From TOPS; Toward Other Planetary Systems
[Washington, D.C.: NASA, Solar System Exploration Division, 19927, 49.)

was blessed, but no proposal for an astrometric telescope for TOPS- 1 was ap-
proved.'"

TOPS-2 envisioned the use of space- or lunar-based instruments to detect
Earth-lilce planets directly. One possibility envisioned was a sixteen-meter in-
frared space telescope, in very high Earth orbit or on the Moon, with cooled
optics. Another option was an interferometric array, perhaps on the Moon. Con-
sidering the normal horizon of NASA thinking, these were very imaginative pro-
posals indeed. ■^-

The obvious place to start was with TOPS-0 and the ground-based efforts
already under way. Although some of the astrometric and ground-based teams
received minimal funding, ironically it was SETI that became the first major
funded element of TOPS-0, when Lennard Fisk tried to shield that program from
congressional budget cuts in October 1992. When Congress terminated SETI
one year later, the planet hunters changed TOPSSWG back to PSSWG, fearing
that the entire TOPS program would be canceled. As attention focused again
on TOPS-0 and the Keck Observatory, a battle took shape in 1993 over who
would obtain funding for testing the Keck interferometry concept. JPL's Mike
Shao proposed a facility on Mt. Palomar in California, but other universities
had their own proposals and feared the worst from JPL, which depended on out-

The Search for Planetary Systems 171

side money for its funding. "The university-based scientists could see the TOPS
program disappearing whole down the voracious mouth of JPL," wrote PSSWG
member Alan Boss. Indeed, by giving JPL the programmatic responsibility of
TOPS, NASA headquarters effectively gave Shao the go-ahead for his "Palomar
Test Bed."^^ TOPS-1, the plans for an orbiting planet-search telescope, was
delayed to the extent that no single design had yet been chosen from those pro-
posed; such a selection was considered premature under the budgetary circum-
stances. And, with NASA's perpetual budget problems, TOPS-2 was off the radar
screen for the foreseeable future.

Still, it is significant that such a far-reaching program as foreseen by TOPS
had been proposed at all. Undoubtedly with an eye toward public relations and
NASA funding but also from deep-seated personal feelings, the TOPS group
was unusually forthright about the motivations for its proposed program. Hu-
mans, they emphasized, had a deep need to understand their relationship with
the universe. The questions of the origins and frequency of planets which TOPS
addressed had been asked for millennia by religion and philosophy but could
now be tackled by science. And they were laying the groundwork for an even
greater challenge, "the ultimate question engendered by the Copemican revolu-
tion: Does life exist on planets around other stars?" The group therefore had an
impressive awareness that its recommendations were not only highly signifi-
cant to science but were also of wider significance to humanity. Whether plan-
etary systems are found to be common or rare, they concluded, "the results of
TOPS investigations cannot fail to inform the human spirit and self-concept in
a deep and fundamental way."^'*

While hopeful for the future of planetary systems science, as the TOPS
group went out of business in the summer of 1995, it could not have known
that the first detections of extrasolar planets around stars similar to our Sun were
just around the comer. In retrospect it is interesting to assess the importance of
two decades of NASA studies to the real landmark discoveries that began to be
made in 1995. The judgment of history must be that NASA played a very mini-
mal role in the early discoveries, which were made by the Swiss team of Michel
Mayor and Didier Queloz, followed shortly by many more discoveries from
Marcy and Butler. Marcy and Butler had begun their project in September 1986,
aware of the pioneering work in Canada of Bruce Campbell and Gordon Walker
using a hydrogen fluoride absorption cell to provide a stable wavelength metric
against which to measure stellar radial velocities. As part of his 1987 master's
thesis, Butler concluded that iodine provided a preferable absorption cell, and
in May of that year he designed and built the cell with San Francisco State Uni-
versity glassblower Mylan Healy. This was the prototype for all subsequent io-
dine cells. Over the next four years, as the TOPS group was undertaking its
studies (in which Marcy and Butler played no role), the SFSU team was unable
to achieve long-term precision better than one hundred meters per second. After
hundreds of blind alleys and innumerable dead ends, by early 1992 their long-
term precision was down to twenty meters per second.^^

1 72 The Living Universe

Up to this point Marcy and Butler's work had been supported entirely by
the NSF, and, when Marcy received his first three-year NASA grant beginning
in 1992, it was not from the planetary science program but from an "Innovative
Research program" designed to support risky but potentially high-yield projects.
Even then, the NASA referees were skeptical of the prospects for success; the
minimal grant paid Butler's first postdoc salary. With crucial improvements to
the Lick-Hamilton spectrograph carried out by Steve Vogt in November 1994
and incremental improvements to the software, Marcy and Butler were able to
reach three meters per second by May 1995. It was October when the Swiss
team made its first announcement of a planet around 5 1 Pegasi, confirmed by
Marcy and Butler about two weeks later. During the following years of con-
tinuous discoveries, the NSF continued to provide the bulk of the team's fund-
ing, with some support from NASA, most notably in continued access to the
Keck telescopes. Looking back at fifteen years of work of the Marcy-Butler team,
Butler was lavish in his praise of NSF funding and critical of NASA's conser-
vative attitude. It was an interesting contrast to the biological component of exo-
biology, in which just the opposite had been true from the early 1960s. ^*

With many studies behind it, and despite its failure to back the team that
actually cracked the problem in 1995, NASA would now embrace the search
for planetary systems beyond the wildest dreams of the TOPS team. Dan Goldin's
entry onto the stage as NASA's administrator on 1 April 1992 would prove cru-
cial to this new direction for the space agency.

Planetary Systems and the Search for Origins

As the twentieth century neared its end, attention to the problem of plan-
etary systems reached new heights. Researchers realized that technology was
ripe to open a new field. Studies in increasingly greater detail were undertaken
demonstrating how planets could be observed from Earth and from space, using
a variety of technologies, including "normal" (filled aperture) space telescopes
and space interferometry. Genuine results were also being announced. The dis-
covery by the Swiss team of Michel Major and Didier Queloz in October 1995
of a planet around a Sun-like star, followed by a raft of similar discoveries by
Marcy, Butler, and others, fed the new field and gave it intense excitement.^^
Observations of circumstellar disks, possible protoplanetary systems, were in-
creasing again, after the initial discoveries of the Infrared Astronomical Satel-
lite in the early 1980s. NASA continued to contribute to the field by funding
researchers and with the Hubble Space Telescope's observations in 1994 of pos-
sible protoplanetary disks around 56 of 110 young stars in the Orion Nebula.^^
Beginning in the 1970s, NASA had also funded an important series of "Proto-
stars and Planets" meetings that brought together researchers in the field; origi-
nally largely theoretical, these meetings increasingly reported observational
results. Perhaps most important of all from a programmatic and funding view-
point, the search for planetary systems became an important part of the bold

The Search for Planetary Systems 1 73

new overarching program at NASA known as Origins. Under its banner plan-
etary systems science was assured of continued attention and funding.

Three studies provided the backbone for the Origins program, although
no one knew when the studies began that they would coalesce into a connected
program. Even as the Solar System Exploration Division's TOPS group was
meeting, the Astrophysics Division of NASA's Office of Space Science had cre-
ated a Space Interferometry Science Working Group (SISWG) to follow up on
the 1991 National Research Council Bahcall Report, which had recommended
the start of an Astrometric Interferometry Mission, with the search for planetary
systems being a major justification. This group was charged with deciding
whether the JPL/Shao Orbiting Stellar Interferometer or Reasenberg's POINTS
should be selected for development, a process at NASA known euphemistically
as "downselecting." The committee met over the next four years and, after many
twists and turns, received a revised charge in 1 995 to decide on an instrument
that could act as a technology precursor for interferometers being proposed by
other committees for planet searches in the long term. The committee certified
in the fall of 1995 that JPL's Orbiting Stellar Interferometer (OSI) satisfied the
requirements and submitted its final report in the spring of 1996. The Astrometric
Interferometry Mission of the Bahcall Report would take the form of JPL's OSI
and was rechristened the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). Planetary sys-
tems were a major part of the mission, scheduled for launch around 2010.^'

Meanwhile, two other groups had been convened which would impact
heavily on the planetary systems theme and eventually the Origins program; their
results fed into the deliberations of the interferometry working group. The first
was the "HST and Beyond" Committee, whose charge was to undertake a broad
study of possible missions for ultraviolet, optical, and infrared astronomy in space
for the first decades of the twenty-first century and to "initiate a process that
will produce a new consensus vision of the long term goals of this scientific
enterprise." This group was chartered in September 1993 by the Associafion of
Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), through the Space Telescope
Institute Council, with support from NASA. The eighteen members of the com-
mittee, chaired by Alan Dressier of the Carnegie Observatories, had broad ex-
perience with observations from space. The committee assumed that planned
programs such as SIRTF and the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared As-
tronomy (SOFIA) would be implemented; they were to look beyond that hori-
zon, with full knowledge of the work of the Bahcall Report, the TOPS group,
and discussions about a next generation of space telescope.

The group met three times, twice in 1994 and for the last time in May
1995, producing its report in May 1996, just a month after the SISWG group's
report.'*" Taking the story of cosmic evolution as its broad background, the com-
mittee noted two crucial missing chapters: the detailed study of the birth and
evolution of normal galaxies such as the Milky Way; and the detection of Earth-
like planets around other stars and the search for evidence of life on them. To
solve these problems the committee recommended a three-pronged approach for

1 74 The Living Universe

the decades beyond 2005. First, the HST observations, with its capabilities in
the optical and ultraviolet, should be extended beyond 2005. Second, a new
Space Telescope, optimized for infrared observations, should be built to follow
in the footsteps of the HST. With a proposed four-meter aperture (compared to
ninety-two inches for HST), it would be the first "facility class" instrument since
the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (the x-ray satellite later christened
"Chandra") and SIRTF, and would allow detailed studies of distant galaxies. This
so-called Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), which had already been
studied since 1989, would end up on the drawing boards as an eight- meter tele-
scope, thanks to the influence of the ubiquitous NASA administrator Dan Goldin,
and eventually would settle on a six-meter mirror. Third, NASA should develop
the capability for space interferometry, both in the optical and infrared regions.
In the view of the committee infrared space interferometry, in particular, would
be essential to the detection and study of extrasolar planets. These recommen-
dations would increase support for the NGST, SIM, and a second-generation
space interferometer even beyond the capabilities of SIM.

As the HST and Beyond group was in the midst of its work, another group
was focusing much more specifically on planetary systems; in many ways its
goal was to update the TOPS report of three years earlier. In March 1995 NASA
chartered a group of scientists and engineers to lay out a roadmap for the Ex-
ploration of Neighboring Planetary Systems (ExNPS). In an activity coordinated
by Charles Elachi, head of the Space and Earth Science Directorate at JPL, three
independent teams developed roadmaps, which were completed in September
1995 and then synthesized into a single plan by an Integration Team. A blue-
ribbon panel headed by Nobelist Charles Townes reviewed the roadmap on 4-5
October, the results were submitted to Dan Goldin on 7 November 1995, and
the plan was published in August 1996.""

One measure of burgeoning interest in the subject is that some 1 35 scien-
tists from 53 institutions participated in the ExNPS deliberations. They concluded
that within twenty years a space-based observatory could detect Earth-like planets
around the closest one thousand stars and characterize the atmospheres of the
brightest ones. The ExNPS report laid out an entire program and timeline, rang-
ing from the indirect detection of planets to "family portraits" of planetary sys-
tems and even detailed images of planets (fig. 7.4). Key to these goals, in addition
to ground-based instruments and space missions already planned, were a space
optical interferometer to detect wobbles in stars due to planets and a space in-
frared interferometer to detect and characterize Earth-like planets to thirteen par-
sees. The optical interferometer would be SIM, Shao's proposal, which had just
been selected by the SISWG. The more long-term infrared interferometer was
envisioned as four or more 1.5-meter telescopes linked together on a 50- to 100-
meter baseline and placed in a deep space orbit some 3 to 5 astronomical units
(AU) from the Sun. It was based on studies by Roger Angel and Shao in 1990,
using a "nulling" principle originating with Ronald Bracewell in 1978. That such
an instrument could directly image and characterize Earth-like planets was the

The Search for Planetary Systems 1 75

Family Portraits

1995 2001 2006 2012

Duett Dttectioii ( I lupiter'Saturns ^^ Urdnus'Neptune^ O f"-*!!'*^

Future

Figure 7.4. Program and timeline for exploring neighboring planetary systems (From A
Roadmap for the Exploration of Neighboring Planetary Systems [Washington, DC: NASA,
1996], 1-2.)

"fundamental finding" of the ExNPS roadmap. Equivalent to the infrared space
interferometer proposed in the TOPS report of 1992, it would soon be given
the name Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF).''^

Following in the steps of the TOPS team four years earlier, the ExNPS
team concluded that some of humanity's oldest questions were within scientific
grasp, including the uniqueness of the Earth and life. "Our firm conclusion is
that NASA can answer these questions within the next 10 to 20 years.""''' Al-
though many reports gathered dust in NASA, the discovery of a planet around
51 Pegasi, announced in October 1995 between the Townes review and the pre-
sentation to Goldin, gave credence to the hope that planets actually existed and
put ExNPS on a fast track. By the time the report was published in the summer
of 1996, it included data for five possible planets around Sun-like stars and an
HST image of a brown dwarf complete with a spectrum taken by the Keck tele-
scope showing the presence of methane — an unambiguous indicator that this
was no normal star (fig. 7.5). In addition, the HST had discovered protoplanetary
systems.

Thus, in the period of a few months in 1996 three independent reports by
the SISWG, HST and Beyond, and ExNPS teams were published. The conclu-
sions of these groups were known well before publication, and Goldin lost little
time capitalizing on them and the excitement of the discoveries of new extrasolar
planets. In January 1996 he presented these results to more than a thousand as-
tronomers at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San
Antonio, Texas, where Marcy and Butler announced the discovery of two more

1 76 The Living Universe

T -*'■'•

/ !

• ■■ ;.,.„., ;«v-,.... .«.^

\'^

-,v"' ;

■■^ '■ " ^•■.-* ' ■■ ■• ,1

Figure 7.5. Hubble Space Telescope image of brown dwarf GL 229B. The large object is
the star Gliese 229. and the brown dwarf is the tiny image, lower right, separated by 7.7
arcseconds. At right the spectrum of the brown dwarf indicates the presence of methane,
similar to the gas giant planets of our solar system. (From A Roadmap for the Exploration
of Neighboring Planetary Systems [Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1996], 3^.)

planets. At this meeting Goldin wrapped together all of these studies as a con-
nected program: NGST as an instrument for studying solar systems in forma-
tion, the Space Interferometry Mission for detecting planets, and the Terrestrial
Planet Finder for studying the planetary characteristics.** The program was called
"Origins."

During the course of 1996 the Origins theme was formahzed during an
administrative restructuring of the agency's Office of Space Science, when the
former ultraviolet, visible, and infrared disciplines were combined into a single
activity."'-'' Wes Huntress, the associate administrator for space science, played
an essential role in this reorganization, which made the "Astronomical Search
for Origins" one of four themes in NASA's Office of Space Science, along with
the Sun-Earth connection, solar system exploration, and the structure and evo-
lution of the universe. The three independent reports published in 1996 on space
interferometry, HST and Beyond, and ExNPS provided its essential foundation.
Indeed, Dressler's HST and Beyond report contained a section on "The Scien-
tific Case for the 'Origins' Program," with the word Origins still in quotation
marks because the name had not yet been officially adopted for the program.

By summer 1997 a detailed "Origins Roadmap" was pubhshed by the Ori-
gins Subcommittee of NASA's Space Science Advisory Committee. The sub-
committee was chaired by none other than David Black, the omnipresent figure
in the field from the mid-1970s planetary systems workshops associated with
SETl. The roadmap described three ambitious scientific goals for the Origins
theme, dealing with galaxies, planets, and life, all keyed to the question "Where

The Search for Planetary Systems 1 77

did we come from?" These goals — the epitome of cosmic evolution — were to
understand how galaxies formed in the early universe and their role in the ap-
pearance of planetary systems and life; how stars and planetary systems form
and whether life-sustaining planets exist around other stars; and how life origi-
nated on Earth and whether it exists elsewhere. SIM and NGST were set for-
ward as the two mission candidates in the 1997 Origins roadmap.''* Terrestrial
Planet Finder was mentioned as a "long-term mission" that would not yet be
ready for the 2000-2004 time frame. By the time the roadmap was updated three
years later a fourth goal was added, distilled from the previous three: whether
habitable or life-bearing planets exist around other stars in the solar neighbor-
hood. Moreover, detailed studies had been done on TPF, and an upgraded ver-
sion featuring four 3.5-meter free-flying telescopes stretched out along a
kilometer baseline was incorporated into the 2000 roadmap.'"

The 2000 Origins roadmap went even beyond the TPF. It envisioned a
Life Finder (LF) to make detailed studies of any planets found by TPF. A Filled-
Aperture Infrared (FAIR) telescope would anticipate the LF by developing tech-
nologies needed for the twenty-five-meter telescopes of LF. Finally, beyond
the NGST, a Space Ultraviolet/Optical telescope would be developed. By com-
bining all these missions into one program, each could build on the previous
technologies.

All of these Origins programs represented missions that would be launched
long term; SIM and NGST would not fly until about 2009 and TPF and LF after
that. Meanwhile, more immediate missions emerged from other NASA programs.
In late 2001 NASA chose the Kepler mission for launch in 2006. Although it
was not formally part of the Origins program, Kepler was very much in the Ori-
gins tradition: in place of astrometry or the radial velocity method, it would use
a photometric method to search for Earth-size planets as they "transited" in front
of a star, dimming the starlight by extremely small amounts. The principle
investigator for the mission was William Borucki, who had worked on the
astrometric telescope project in the early 1980s at Ames. Still at Ames (where,
as we shall see in chap. 9, an astrobiology program was in full swing), Borucki
had been pushing such a mission for more than a decade. Now Kepler would
be able to monitor one hundred thousand Sun-like stars for four years, looking
for light variations that might indicate other Earths. In the planet-hunting tradi-
tion persistence paid off.

The progress in observational planetary systems science over twenty-five
years was impressive. While the general search techniques were known even at
the beginning of that period, by its end they had not only been greatly fleshed
out, but planets and protoplanetary systems had actually been discovered. Just
as early in its history the question of life on Mars drove much of NASA's space
science effort, so now the question of planetary systems and life drove NASA's
goals as never before. With HST returning spectacular pictures, SIRTF (the last
of the Great Observatories) about to be launched, and Kepler, NGST, SIM, and
TPF on the drawing boards, no one could accuse NASA of lacking vision. At

1 78 The Living Universe

least this was true in the space sciences, by contrast to human spaceflight, in
which the space shuttle and space station were stuck in Earth's orbit. Curiously,
the vision of space scientists — in part because of the lure of planets and life —
was outmaneuvering the more expensive manned space flight, the latest episode
in a long-running debate about the relative merits of the two approaches. For
the planet search, the challenge was turning the vision into reality, a process
that was a matter of NASA's internal priorities, public interest, and congressional
funding.

Chapter 8

The <:Mars 'Tiock

: Hn(

Flues in Meteorite Seem to Show Signs
ind of Organic Molecules from Space."
The headline jumped out from the front page of the New York Times. It was
Wednesday, 7 August 1996.' A few days later the top headline of the "Science"
section of the Times declared, "After Mars Rock, a Revived Hunt for Other-
worldly Organisms." Feature articles described the breaking news about Mars
meteorite ALH84001^ and also (with a high-resolution photo of Europa taken
by the Galileo spacecraft) the possibility that "Jupiter's Moon Europa Could
Be Habitat for Life."^ The 7 August headlines were prompted by NASA calling
a very sudden press conference at its Washington, D.C., headquarters, announc-
ing findings from a Martian meteorite which suggested that microbial life may
have existed on Mars over 3.5 billion years in the past; the two lead researchers
were career NASA scientists. In close coordination with the NASA announce-
ment, the White House issued further remarks. President Bill Clinton himself
called this potentially one of the most important scientific discoveries in his-
tory; he called for a space sunmiit in November to discuss future exploration of
Mars. Vice President Al Gore began organizing a private conference for De-
cember to discuss the larger social implications if the discovery turned out to
be true. In November and December NASA planned to launch the Mars Global
Surveyor (an orbiter) and Mars Pathfinder (a lander, with a mini-surface rover
called Sojourner) spacecraft, to arrive at Mars in the summer of 1997. In Sep-
tember planning was already well under way at JPL for a mission to return a
Martian sample to Earth by 2005."* Not in the twenty years since Viking had Mars
or NASA exobiology work generated this level of excitement. To most of the
public it all seemed to come out of nowhere. As it turned out, even members of
the research team working on the Mars meteorite had not originally planned to
have their press conference until 15 August, the day before their published ar-
ticle would appear, and they were scrambling, in a rather unorthodox way for
science, to break the story nine days ahead of publication (fig 8.1).^ This surely
ranks as one of the most dramatic moments in the history of NASA Exobiology,
and it was the single most important impetus that led to the creation of astrobi-
ology. No episode, not even the Viking search for life on Mars, demonstrates so

179

180 The Living Universe

Figure 8. 1 . Three lead members of the team that authored the 1996 Science article arguing
that biochemical and microscopic evidence from Mars meteorite ALH84001 suggested
possible fossil life from ancient Mars. Left to right: Everett Gibson, Kathie Thomas-Keprta,
and David McKay, posing with a globe of Mars in February 2000. In the background is a
highly magnified image of the "nanostructure" that came to be dubbed the "worm."
(Courtesy NASA.)

dramatically how integral public interest (and spending) has become to the sci-
ence of exobiology; but how did it all come about? To find the roots of the story,
we must go back almost all the way to Viking days.

Its Preposterous Heritage

In 1982 Donald Bogard and Pratt Johnson, two scientists at NASA's
Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, announced that they had liberated a
sample of trapped gas from within glass inclusions in a meteorite picked up in
Antarctica in 1979. The meteorite was named Elephant Moraine 79001 (from
its location and the fact that it was the first one processed by scientists in 1979),
or EETA79001 . Upon analyzing the gas, they discovered that it matched almost
perfectly the gas mixture of the atmosphere of Mars as measured by Viking in
1976.^ When they published the detailed results,'' the most likely explanation
was an eye-opener: this rock had somehow been blasted off Mars some two hun-
dred million years ago by an impact large enough to accelerate it to escape ve-

The Mars Rock 181

locity (5 km/second). Then after a long time in space its orbit intersected Earth's,
it landed, and there it lay, a stranger in a strange land, waiting only to be picked
up once scientists became aware, beginning in 1969, of how many meteorites
lay undamaged on the ice of Antarctic glaciers. Over forty-seven hundred of
them had been collected by the end of 1980.^

Researchers had been thinking for some time that a group of rare meteor-
ites called "Shergottite-Nakhlite-Chassignites" (SNCs),' though clearly extrater-
restrial, were similar geochemically to terrestrial basalt and thus were from a
parent body that had experienced complex melting and crystallization through
vulcanism similar to Earth's. But the SNCs were all thought to have crystal-
lized only 1 .3 billion years ago, long after the asteroids and the Moon had cooled
enough for volcanic activity to end. "Thus Mars and its relatively young lava
flows seemed to be the most likely source. As Benton Clark of Martin Marietta
Denver Aerospace showed ... the chemical composition of Shergotty, the first
of the four Shergottites to be found, provides the best match to the composition
of Martian soil as determined by the Viking landers."'" Still, the match by it-
self did not seem scientifically compelling. But Bogard and Johnson's 1982
analysis of noble gases within meteorite EETA79001, also a Shergottite, "brought
sudden respectability, if not credibility, to the suggestion of a Martian origin.""
The shock of the impact that blasted the rock off Mars formed the glass within,
trapping gas from the Martian atmosphere in the glass.

At a conference on 1 7 March 1983 at the JSC, the idea received a further
boost, albeit a psychological one. Even more convincing evidence, from direct
geochemical comparison with Apollo lunar samples, showed another Antarctic
meteorite to be undeniably from the Moon. The conceptual barrier to accepting
the idea of intact escape of a rock from a planetary-sized body had been bro-
ken.'^ Afterward researchers refined their calculations and eventually concluded
that the SNC meteorites were probably Martian, even if they could not prove
right away how it was physically possible to get the original approximately ten-
meter boulder (from which the meteorite must have come) off of Mars and up
high enough to escape velocity without it being vaporized or pulverized. Inter-
planetary travel from Mars to Earth had occurred on several occasions, it seemed.
(Earth's gravity is so much greater that it is a great deal less likely that an Earth
meteorite could survive ejection to escape velocity and ever reach Mars.) It is
currently believed that several Martian meteorites arrive on Earth every year,
along with several from the Moon. The totals from each are about the same: even
though the Moon is a much closer source. Mars is so much larger a target that it is
struck more often by impacts large enough to eject rocks at escape velocity.'^

By 1987 even University of Arizona geochemist Michael Drake, who was
at first very skeptical, said of the Martian origin of the SNCs: "It's probable,
but not proven; it's not likely to be incorrect. But short of going to Mars, no
one will be absolutely convinced."''* Evidently, the psychological barrier was
not removed all at once at the 1983 JSC meeting; Richard Kerr noted in 1987:
"perhaps more than anything, the passage of time has made a Martian origin an

J82 The Living Universe

acceptable hypothesis. . . . Naturally enough, those working with the impres-
sive geochemical data are most inclined to accept the idea, but support has broad-
ened considerably." '5 Among those familiar with the data were geologist David
McKay of JSC, Houston, and geochemist Harry McSween of the University of
Tennessee. Subsequently, as of late 1999, a total of seventeen meteorites were
known to have come from Mars; Bogard and Garrison showed that seven of
them contained trapped Martian gases. (By April 2004 the number was thirty.)'^
In addition. University of Chicago isotope geochemist Robert Clayton recog-
nized that all the SNCs have a unique nonterrestrial composition of oxygen iso-
topes in their silicate minerals which "shows they were from a unique oxygen
reservoir within our solar system."'^

By 1989 researchers at Britain's Open University thought they had dis-
covered native organic matter in EETA79001.'^ This would have been extraor-
dinary, since the Viking GCMS had shown no organic matter on the Martian
surface, down to a few parts per billion. When other groups tried to replicate
these results and failed, however, it was concluded that the organics in the me-
teorite must be Earthly contamination that seeped into it along with Antarctic
meltwater during the thousands of years it lay exposed on the ice sheet there.
Although this controversy attracted relatively little attention in the press, the re-
sult was that the scientific community still believed by the mid-1990s that Mars
had no native organic matter, and, therefore, neither did Martian meteorites.''
Even so, and notwithstanding the continued public disagreement of the major-
ity of scientists with Gilbert Levin over the Viking LR results, the convening of
an International Symposium on the Biological Evolution of Mars at Florida State
University on 26-28 October 1990 showed that, whatever the public percep-
tion in the years after Viking, in the exobiology science community a hard core
of interest in life on Mars remained very much alive and active. The conference
was convened by Imre Friedmann and his ACME research group; other promi-
nent participants included a wide sampling from the origin of life / exobiology
field, including many senior researchers and administrators. Among them were
Harvard Precambrian paleofossil expert Andrew Knoll; chemist Benton Clark,
Leiden University (Netherlands) comet expert J. Mayo Greenberg; biological
and prebiotic membrane specialist David Deamer; NASA Exobiology chief John
Rummel; former NASA Exobiology chief Richard Young; Harold Klein of
NASA Ames; National University of Mexico biologist Antonio Lazcano; chemo-
autolithotroph specialist and director of the Soviet Institute for Microbiology
Mikhail Ivanov; biochemist Klaus Dose of Johann Gutenberg University in
Mainz, Germany; planetary scientist Chris McKay; NASA Ames organic chemist
and veteran of Moon rock analysis Sherwood Chang; and many others. It was a
veritable who's who of the exobiology community in many countries and through
at least two generations.

Little surprise, then, that analysis continued on the Mars meteorites, not
only from a purely geochemical or planetary science point of view but, for some
workers, with at least an occasional thought for exobiology. With continued study

The Mars Rock 183

of meteorites and collection of new ones, more were recognized to be of the
SNC class, and their Martian origin was more and more widely and certainly
accepted. In 1993 David Mittlefehldt of NASA's JSC in Houston recognized
for the first time that a 1 .9 kilogram, potato-sized rock, the first meteorite col-
lected in 1984 in the Allan Hills, near the Antarctic Dry Valleys (hence desig-
nated ALH84001), belonged to the Martian group. He sent a small chip of the
meteorite to Robert Clayton's lab at the University of Chicago, where it was
confirmed that ALH84001 had the unique Martian oxygen "isotopic finger-
print. "2" It was later found that the meteorite had been ejected from Mars six-
teen million years ago and had landed in Antarctica thirteen thousand years ago.^'

At the same time, in a lab across the hall from Mittlefehldt at JSC, NRC
postdoc Chris Romanek, working in geochemist Everett Gibson's lab, was using
a tightly focused laser beam on carbonaceous chondrites (including the Murchi-
son meteorite) to measure the carbon isotope ratio at precise spots within the
sample where they contained carbonate minerals. Romanek was a specialist in
the formation of such minerals and wanted "to gain insights into whether those
carbonate minerals were formed perhaps by biological processes and at what
temperatures they formed."^^ Mittlefehldt was going over some images of small
(1-250 ^un diameter) globules of carbonate within ALH84001; knowing these
were Romanek's special interest, he came across the hall and asked, "Hey Chris,
do you want to see some really neat pictures of a meteorite that I'm working
on?" He added that this was the latest addition to the family of Martian meteor-
ites. Romanek was fascinated and immediately asked for a piece of the sample
to include in his study on carbon isotope ratios, which Mittlefehldt supplied.
This was the only one of the SNC meteorites known to have anything more than
traces of carbonate minerals.

Romanek worked from 1993 to 1996 with geochemist Everett Gibson from
JSC; they soon found that the carbon isotope ratios of the carbonate globules in
ALH84001 were unlike any sample ever seen on Earth. They contacted the Open
University group in Britain, Colin Pillinger, Ian Wright, and Monica Grady,
knowing they were working on the same meteorite but using a different method,
and asked what ratio they had measured. Both groups had independently arrived
at a value (for 13C relative to 12C) of plus-forty per mil, using different meth-
ods; they agreed in 1994 to publish the finding together in NatureP In this pa-
per they also concluded that the stable oxygen isotope data supported a
low-temperature (between 0 and 80°C) formation of the carbonate globules. This
could indicate that they had resulted from biological activity; however, "petro-
graphic and electron microprobe results indicated that the carbonates formed at
relatively high temperatures (~700°C)."2'* These latter measurements were made
by Case Western Reserve University geochemist Ralph Harvey and Harry
McSween of the University of Tennessee. Clearly, this ambiguity had to be re-
solved before anything could be safely said about the origin of the globules.
But, argued the JSC and Open University group, the unusual carbon isotope
signature in the globules did suggest they had formed on Mars rather than Earth.

184 The Living Universe

In trying to gain further insight into the temperature issue, Romanek de-
cided to try an acid etching technique he had heard about in a talk by Univer-
sity of Texas geologist Robert Folk at the Geological Society of America. Folk
had acid-etched carbonates that came from hot springs (on Earth), then used
scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to image their surface features. So,
Romanek tried the procedure on some of the ALH carbonate globules, using
the SEM in the Solar System Exploration Division at JSC in Houston. In the
original work Folk had seen "tiny features that he later characterized as
nanobacteria; the fossilized remains of dwarf or miniature-sized bacteria that
were trapped or entombed in these hot spring deposits."^^ Now in May 1994,
when Romanek looked at the carbonate globules from the Mars rock, he saw
features that looked strikingly similar to Folk's.

"In my estimation this is where the whole project began," he said. "I took
those pictures down to Everett Gibson's office, and I showed him the pictures I
got . . . and the pictures in Bob Folk's publication. I said you can see the dif-
ference between what you see in the meteorite and what we see for published
nanobacteria in terrestrial rocks. ... He immediately lit up, . . . and he said
'Chris, we need to go down and talk to Dave McKay. '"^^ McKay ran the SEM
and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) lab at the Johnson Space Center;
having been in on analysis of lunar soils from the very beginning, he was an
expert on planetary regoliths. Once Gibson and Romanek showed him the pho-
tos and filled him in on the story, McKay became very interested but realized
that he could not devote enough time to the project, so he asked if Gibson and
Romanek would agree to bring in electron microscopy expert Kathie Thomas-
Keprta, a contractor at JSC employed by Lockheed Martin Corporation nearby
in Houston; they agreed. Both Gibson and McKay had been NASA Exobiology
grantees before, though most of McKay's funding had come from the NASA
Planetary Materials Program. McKay had also previously worked with Mittle-
fehldt's group, doing SEM petrography on thin sections of ALH84001 to see
whether any Martian regolith was mixed into the less-dense, jumbled-up tex-
ture zones in the rock. Now Gibson and McKay applied for a new grant, specifi-
cally to look for signs of life in Martian meteorites. Their initial proposal was
rejected, but another, submitted the next year (before the announcement of their
work on ALH84001), was granted in the late summer of 1996.^^ They knew
Chris Romanek's postdoc at JSC would soon end, so they made themselves, both
career civil servants at JSC, the principal investigators on the grant applications.

When Kathie Thomas-Keprta was first approached, she was resistant to
becoming involved in the Mars meteorite project; she already had a large
workload in a project examining interplanetary dust particles (IDPs). When
McKay explained what he wanted from her, she was highly skeptical, a "doubt-
ing Thomas" as she later described herself at the August 1996 press conference.
But Romanek continued urging her, getting on the SEM with samples and show-
ing them to her, and she slowly warmed to the project. Then, recalled Romanek,
when she saw very tiny grains of the mineral magnetite in thin sections, located

The Mars Rock 185

in the dark rims of the carbonate globules, "she became excited because she
had . . . [seen] magnetites in other meteorites and in interplanetary dust par-
ticles . . . and knew that these magnetites in this meteorite were very different.
... She started digging in the literature and realized — she's the one that came
to the conclusion — these magnetites look exactly like magnetites that form from
bacteria on Earth. And I think at that point it crystallized in her mind the sig-
nificance of what she was working on and how much more work needed to be
done. "2^

Early in 1995 Gibson invited J. William Schopf, the UCLA specialist in
microfossils, to come to Houston and look at their images of putative nano-
bacteria. Schopf came in January; "he thought the morphological evidence was
very interesting, but it was far from conclusive. ... His main point . . . was
that you will never convince anyone that these things are biologic unless you
can find organic matter associated with them. And . . . that was kind of a big
letdown for us, because we knew that there was no organic matter on Mars."^'

McKay and Thomas-Keprta had previously worked with a team at Stanford
University under Richard Zare to quantify carbon compounds in IDPs. Zare's
team used a machine called a microprobe two-step laser mass spectrometer
([XL2MS). Now Thomas-Keprta suggested their technique might be capable of
finding organics in the carbonate globules, since it was capable of being focused
down to a forty micron-diameter spot in a sample. She contacted Simon Clemett
of the Stanford team and, without saying anything about the source of her
samples, asked if Zare and Clemett's group could analyze them and tell her
whether there was any carbon associated with them. The specialized Stanford
mass spectrometer in March 1995 was tuned to look for a type of organic mol-
ecule called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), so, in order to avoid al-
tering the settings, that is what they first looked for. PAHs are commonly found
in interstellar matter, on meteorites, and in many other places, including on Earth.
They can be formed by a variety of processes, both biological (in petroleum
formation, in coals) and totally abiotic (in flame chemistry, auto exhaust, and
interstellar gas), but one place they had never yet been detected was on Mars or
on Mars meteorites. On each of three separate ALH84001 samples, PAHs were
found to be quite common.

This was a major discovery in itself, since no organic molecules of any
kind had been found on Mars. (The intellectual bias that would have resulted
from that knowledge justified keeping the identity of the samples from the
Stanford team until after it had made its measurements, according to Romanek.)
The JSC team carried out numerous control experiments to demonstrate con-
clusively that the PAHs did not get into the sample in the Houston lab, the
Stanford lab, or in transport between the two. Simon Clemett even showed that
the concentration of the molecules increased from outside the meteorite to the
inside, strongly presumptive evidence that the PAHs were native to the inside
of the Mars rock.^°

Because of their ubiquitous distribution in the universe from abiotic as

186 The Living Universe

well as biological chemistry, the molecules were not ideal as markers of bio-
genic organic matter, what the JSC team was initially seeking. But the very find-
ing of organics in a Martian sample where no one believed there would be any
was a big boost to the team's hopes that the morphological findings in the rock
might have biological significance. Romanek had gotten a job when his postdoc
ended and moved in March 1995 to the University of Georgia's Savannah River
Ecology Lab. Therefore, an additional team member was recruited at JSC to do
more intensive TEM work, Hojatollah Vali, a McGill University Ph.D. gradu-
ate in electron microscopy who was at JSC on an NRC fellowship. Thomas-
Keprta and Vali worked hard to get the clearest, most unambiguous electron
micrographs possible of the "nanostructures."

At the March 1995 annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference at JSC,
Thomas-Keprta gave a paper on interim thinking on the project, barely hinting
at the idea that the evidence to date might be of biogenic origin. The title was
"Organics Indigenous to Mars or Terrestrial Contamination?" as the controls had
not yet been done; the press showed little interest, as a result. Most researchers
outside the team assumed that, because Viking had shown no organics on Mars,
the PAHs must be Earthly contamination. One exception was a reporter from
the Houston Chronicle, Carlos Byars, who seemed to catch a whiff of where
the finding of organic matter might be headed. After starting his new job at Sa-
vannah River, Romanek stayed in constant telephone contact with the Houston
group and retumed to work intensively on the project for two weeks in June,
three weeks in December 1995, and then as a visiting faculty member for the
summer of 1996. McKay obtained a lot of very high-resolution SEM images of
the nanostructures on the carbonate globules using a field emission gun (FEG
SEM) at the NASA Houston facility.

By late 1995 the members of the team began to think that they might be
close to having enough data after almost three years of work to submit a paper
to Science or Nature, arguing for a possible biological explanation for the data.
Because the igneous rock had crystallized on Mars 4.5 billion years ago (much
older than any of the other SNC meteorites) and the carbonate globules seemed
to have formed within the rock between 1.3 billion and 3.6 billion years ago,
their argument would amount to hypothesizing that microscopic life had existed
on Mars sometime between 1.3 and 3.6 billion years ago (probably at the earli-
est end of that period, since Mars began to dry up and lose its atmosphere by 3
billion years ago). As the carbonate globules formed, Romanek thought that,
possibly under the influence of some biogenic process in an aqueous environ-
ment at a temperature below 80°C, some microbes (at least the extremely tiny
ones, only 100 to 380 nm long — i.e., only 0.100 to 0.380 (jm) became trapped
in the globules and later fossilized there.

From the beginning of work on the paper, the team members realized that
none of their lines of evidence was conclusive by itself; all had ambiguities that
allowed for an abiotic explanation as readily as a biogenic one. Thus, they be-
gan constructing their argument according to an unusual line of reasoning:

The Mars Rock 187

whereas each of several different lines of evidence was not in itself conclusive
proof of biogenic activity, "when they are considered collectively, particularly
in light of their spatial association, we conclude that they are evidence for primi-
tive life on early Mars."^' This reasoning (perhaps used only out of lack of
choice) was representative of the historical process of the investigation, rather
than the much more common rationalist reconstruction used in scientific papers
to make it look as though the entire investigation unfolded in a logical sequence
according to rational hypotheses and their tidy, sequential testing. According to
Chris Romanek, the published version of the paper was actually substantially
more cautious and qualified in its claims than what was first submitted, which
he considered an excellent outcome — the scientific process working just the way
it should.^^ As we shall see, however, in the minds of a great many scientists,
the kind of reasoning in the Science paper weakened the case and made it suspect
from the outset.^-'

Its Sudden Fame

McKay, Gibson, and their colleagues submitted their paper to Science on
5 April 1996, later revised it, and had it accepted on 16 July 1996; on 7 August
of that year they announced its findings in a NASA press conference, and the
paper was finally published nine days later. It opened with two major qualify-
ing statements: "Our task is difficult because we only have a small piece of rock
from Mars and we are searching for Martian biomarkers on the basis of what
we know about life on Earth. Therefore, if there is a Martian biomarker, we may
not be able to recognize it, unless it is similar to an earthly biomarker. Addi-
tionally, no information is available on the geologic context of this rock on
Mars."^'' The first point was a constant occupational hazard that had dogged exo-
biology from its beginning. The last point, about the rock being studied in com-
plete absence of its geological context, has recently been shown to be a problem
well worth mentioning up front. We will return to this at the end of this chapter.

The authors then laid out four main lines of evidence to indicate possible
biogenic activity, which they later summed up as: "1) the presence of carbonate
globules which had been formed at temperatures favorable for life, 2) the pres-
ence of biominerals (magnetites and sulfides) with characteristics nearly identi-
cal to those formed by certain bacteria, 3) the presence of indigenous reduced
carbon within Martian materials, and 4) the presence in the carbonate globules
of features similar in morphology to biological structures."^^ These lines of evi-
dence were not simply to be considered in an additive fashion, they argued; be-
cause so much of the independently suggestive molecules all existed in the
carbonate globules or their immediate vicinity, the presumption of all having
been caused by biogenic activity in that locale was strengthened in a synergis-
tic way. This "spatial association" argument was important: a large number of
observers were willing to dismiss the case out of hand based on each of the lines
considered separately because in not one of those cases had the team shown the

188 The Living Universe

biogenic explanation to be significantly more persuasive than one or more abi-
otic explanations. Many skeptics who said they still kept an open mind on the
question said it was the spatial association argument that gave them pause.

Because some of the carbonate globules were "shock-faulted," which must
have occurred on Mars or in space, the authors argued, this ruled out an Earthly
origin for the globules. On Earth such fine-grained carbonates usually form under
water and most often by biologically mediated processes; in addition, Thomas-
Keprta found minerals in their rims that were often associated with microbial
activity (magnetite, pyrrhotite, and other iron sulfides such as greigite). The Sci-
ence paper argued that the redox and pH conditions usually required for the in-
organic deposition of fine-grained carbonates, magnetite, pyrrhotite, and greigite
were largely incompatible with one another; it would require a strained and ex-
tremely unlikely combination of circumstances to explain the formation of all
these minerals in the same place by purely abiotic means.^^

The paper carefully ran through the control experiments that had been car-
ried out to rule out contamination at JSC, in transit, or at Stanford as the source
of the PAHs. The authors had cultured chips of the meteorite in standard mi-
crobial media, both aerobically and anaerobically, and had found the chips to
be sterile.^'' Regarding the possibility that the molecules represented terrestrial
contamination from before the meteorite was ever collected in the Antarctic, they
argued that the outside crust was almost totally devoid of the PAHs. Further-
more, their concentration rose going in toward the center; it was highest in the
immediate vicinity of the carbonate globules. The authors took this to be sug-
gestive of a common (biogenic) process of origin for the globules and the PAHs.

In the published paper (unlike at the press conference, where some more
recent and more dramatic SEM images were also shown) the least was made of
the putative "nanobacteria." They were described for the most part using the
neutral description "ovoid and elongated forms." Only a single paragraph com-
pares them to Folk's nanobacteria and states that they "resemble some forms of
fossilized filamentous bacteria in the terrestrial fossil record," noting, however,
that those microfossils are "more than an order of magnitude larger than the
forms seen in the ALH84001 carbonates."^^ Predictably enough, the press and
the public watching on television responded much more strongly to visual im-
ages that looked like familiar bacterial shapes than to arcane arguments about
isotope chemistry or little-heard-of molecules such as PAHs. To one not famil-
iar with microbial biochemistry there was no obvious reason why a lower limit
on bacterial size, if it existed, would fall above these structures, whose shape
was so compellingly lifelike.

Above and beyond the scientific evidence or logic, another factor that may
potentially have predisposed some observers to be skeptical was the JSC team's
unusually secretive behavior during the time the work was being done and even
after the paper had been submitted and was under review for publication in Sci-
ence. Everett Gibson has stated that the team considered the Clinton Adminis-
tration and the bureaucracy at NASA headquarters in Washington to be a "sieve,"

The Mars Rock 189

systematically subject to press leaks of any important story. Thus, after the sum-
mer or fall of 1995 the team deliberately did not keep NASA managers in the
usual chain of command informed of their work; they simply considered the
story so potentially big that, without secrecy, leak(s) would be inevitable. They
informed their immediate supervisor, Doug Blanchard, as well as Carol Huntoon,
in the director's office at JSC, but no other "higher ups."^^

David McKay has also said that members of the group wanted to gather
as much evidence as they could before publicizing their argument, to be sure
they were right before going out on a limb with such an extraordinary claim.
Schopf's January 1995 comments had certainly sensitized them to this possi-
bility, in addition to their own scientific training about what makes compelling
evidence. Furthermore, according to McKay, "we knew a hundred other groups
had this meteorite and we didn't want to be scooped by one of them, and we
knew if we started talking about this openly at meetings and so forth, every-
body would turn to it and start looking at it, and so we wanted to be first really.'"*"
These circumstances come with the territory of exploring a tmly exciting new
discovery; how to handle them is not spelled out in any simple set of rules in a
handbook, so scientists attempt to negotiate these treacherous waters on a case-
by-case basis when they discover themselves in such situations. Concern for
priority, if not ubiquitous, is at least very common; given the grant-based, peer-
review-driven process of modem science it could hardly be otherwise.'*!

In the event, the concerns of the JSC team turned out to be justified in a
more bizarre way than any of its members foresaw. When Science officially ac-
cepted the paper on 16 July, top NASA administrator Dan Goldin finally got
wind of what the JSC team had been working on and of the news that it was to
appear in print in the most prestigious science journal in the country in one
month. He immediately contacted associate administrator Wes Huntress and told
him to get Gibson and McKay to Washington, D.C., and into his office as quickly
as possible. Within days the two had been ordered to do a command perfor-
mance before their most senior of bosses. In Goldin's office at NASA headquar-
ters in late July, Huntress watched as Goldin grilled the two scientists mercilessly,
probing the strengths and weaknesses of their soon-to-be-published argument.
Goldin recognized that the entire prestige of NASA, not merely of these scien-
tists, was riding on the publication of such a spectacular claim. The October
1993 cancellation of all SETI funds by Congress, after Nevada Senator Rich-
ard Bryan convinced his colleagues that it was a frivolous "great Martian chase,"
was a wound that still smarted. And a major congressional vote on renewed
NASA funding was coming up in September.

After two hours or more Gibson and McKay had satisfied Goldin that the
ALH84001 paper made its claims with proper scientific caution and had secure
and provocative evidence for how far it pressed the case for past life on Mars.
He congratulated the two men and told them henceforth to communicate any
news directly with him or his deputy, skipping over intermediate officials in the
hierarchy.''^ Then he eagerly went to work, first to notify the president and vice

190 The Living Universe

president of what could potentially be the most important scientific story of all
time. He instigated planning of a major news conference for 15 August, just
prior to publication, to announce the results to the press and the world and to
explain the evidence and its limitations carefully. So concerned was Goldin to
avoid the impression that NASA was being grandiose and unscientific that he
arranged for J. William Schopf of UCLA to give a formal presentation at the
press conference of the case for why he (Schopf) and many other scientists were
skeptical and felt the evidence did not justify the conclusion of past life on
Mars.43

President Bill Clinton took great interest in the findings; Vice President
Gore even more so. Among others who were briefed by Clinton was his closest
political advisor, Dick Morris. The reader may recall that in mid- August of 1996
a scandal arose in the White House when it came out that Morris had an ongo-
ing relationship with a girlfriend who was a prostitute. In late July, just prior to
those revelations, one of the last pieces of inside information Morris's girlfriend
became privy to was the Mars meteorite findings. She immediately set about
calling up newspapers, including a British tabloid, trying to sell the story. Ac-
cording to Gibson, he had given a copy of the galley proofs of the Science manu-
script, which had his initials on it, to Goldin. Goldin had sent it to the White
House, "and it went from Al Gore, Bill Clinton to Richard Morris to the hooker
who tried to sell it, and it ended up in a colleague's hands in England who called
me [before any public announcement] and said I know your initials.'"^

NASA headquarters began receiving calls from the news media around
1 August, inquiring if there was any substance to the story. "When the story got
out, there were press people who had galley proofs!" observed NASA Exobiol-
ogy chief Michael Meyen'*^ Goldin realized that an even worse public relations
debacle was in the making than he had feared initially; he quickly attempted
emergency damage control by pushing up the press conference eight days, to
7 August, the soonest it seemed possible to assemble at least the key players at
NASA headquarters. (Romanek was en route from Houston back to Savannah
River when CNN broke the news on television on the night of 6 August and
said that the press conference in Washington was now scheduled for the next
day at 12:30 or 1 p.m. He happened to be watching the news report and thus
learned of the change in barely enough time to rework his plans and get a plane
to Washington in the middle of the night. By the morning of the seventh the
story had appeared on the front page of the New York Times and the Washing-
ton Post. Romanek was in a cab from the airport, trying to get to NASA head-
quarters— never having been there, he was at the mercy of a cab driver's
knowledge. )"•*

The scientific community looks with profound unease upon efforts that
seem to be "headline grabbing." It is considered acceptable behavior to publi-
cize one's work to the press only after (or simultaneous with) the publication
of the findings and after they have undergone a formal peer review process. The
shunning of Pons and Fleischmann by the scientific community after they chose

The Mars Rock 191

to announce their "cold fusion" discovery by way of a press conference well
before any paper had completed the prepublication process reveals just how
strong a behavioral norm this practice has become. Thus, Goldin was taking a
calculated risk in making an early announcement on a topic with the long,
publicity-charged history of life on Mars, even only nine days early.

NASA officials had feared that, because the original 15 August date came
during the 1996 Republican presidential convention, "there's a worry that this
is going to backfire, this is going to look like orchestration at the highest level.'"*^
It would be directly competing for headlines with Bob Dole's announcement of
his running mate. But moving the date up was also not good etiquette in sci-
ence rather than politics; NASA did indeed take heat in the press for this choice.
Speculation was rife that Goldin was trying to influence the congressional bud-
get vote for NASA in September; there was no obvious reason otherwise to
broach a sacred behavioral norm of science, and without details Goldin's vague
assertions about an imminent news leak did not sound convincing enough to
justify the impropriety. At the very least some said NASA was still, as in the
Viking days, unable to resist the temptation for "grandstanding.'"*^ In retrospect,
now knowing the source of the potential leak, Goldin's calculation seems per-
fectly reasonable, even wise.

Its Disputed Meaning

Independent of its slightly unorthodox debut (and its near-miss with an
even more scandalous career), the scientific case for "possible relic biogenic
activity in ALH84001" received a great deal of attention from the scientific com-
munity, most of it in the nature of real scientific examination and critical review.
The Mars meteorite soon became "the most intensively studied two kilograms
of rock in history," with $2.3 million in NASA and NSF funding allocated for
its analysis by November 1998.'*' NASA Exobiology chief Michael Meyer feh
the paper was a positive contribution to science. Of its authors he said: "They're
honest scientists, and they didn't jump the gun. They did good research, and
looking at all the lines of evidence they had, that's what their conclusion was.
It's a bold conclusion, and most people would be more conservative. But it's

their honest conclusion It's generated a lot of interest already. We're going

to learn more about what we know and don't know, and my suspicion is we'll
end up two years from now saying, 'well, the odds are ... , but we don't know.'
So we have to go to Mars.''^" Many were fascinated by the findings; a great
many felt much the same as Meyer about the process of science in action, even
among those who were extremely doubtful of the biogenic explanation of the find-
ings. There was no shortage of such critics, nor were they silent about their views.

J. William Schopf had the earliest opportunity (after those who reviewed
the paper for Science) to respond. He was among the harshest critics, for whom
the "spatial association" argument held no persuasive value at all. He describes
the entire body of evidence as "circumstantial," saying that in science it simply

192 The Living Universe

would not constitute proof. In his colloquial terminology nothing less than a
"smoking gun" was an adequate standard of proof. ^'

When Dan Goldin first invited Schopf to be part of the NASA press con-
ference announcing the findings, Schopf had replied with a trademark line of
Carl Sagan's which he often used when criticizing less-than-convincing paleo-
fossils claims: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." But he tried
to turn down the invitation politely; he thought in this case that the evidence
"was not even close." Schopf opines that, because Goldin was "a Sagan fan (and
was said to have been pleased by the quote)," this might account for why Goldin
"had personally pegged me for the job" and prevailed upon Schopf until he
agreed to participate. It seems likely that Schopf 's involvement in the story since
January 1995 as critical outside referee also played a part in Goldin's choice.
But in any case, applying the "Sagan standard," Schopf believed in the case of a
claim as extraordinary as life on Mars (even "possible relic life"), the evidence
must be more extraordinary than even for paleofossils on Earth. The gun must
not only be smoking, but there must also be a ballistics match.^^ Six years later
Schopf would discover that the Sagan standard could be used in ways less to
his liking, as we shall see.

In his presentation at the press conference Schopf objected to each one of
the lines of evidence. The carbonate globules did not appear to him, a longtime
specialist in microfossils and paleofossils, to have any characteristics that com-
pelled him to think they were likely to have been made by living processes. The
morphology and micrographs of the nanostructures were indeed striking, he said,
but they were so tiny that they could not possibly contain even the minimum
requirements to be alive. The most striking micrographs shown at the press con-
ference, showing among other things a structure that came to be called the
"Worm," had not been peer reviewed, as had the paper, Schopf pointed out. Fi-
nally, PAHs were so ubiquitous, even on meteorites, that Schopf said they did
not have any biotic implications at all. The members of the Mars meteorite team
had made clear in the paper that they knew about the ubiquitous distribution of
PAHs; nonetheless, a great many more critics very quickly attacked their case
on this point. John Oro was one of them; to him it seemed that the team's mem-
bers simply did not understand what this meant. If they did, they would share
the opinion of himself, Schopf, and many others that the meteorite PAHs were
consistent with abiotic processes.^^ Their emphasis was on the opposite side of
the coin that there was "nothing inconsistent with biogenic origin." To Schopf
and Oro that was precisely the extraordinary claim that the scientific method
prohibited without extraordinary evidence. Because the greatest danger in sci-
ence was, as Norman Horowitz had emphasized during the planning of Viking
and physicist Dick Feynman famously warned: "You must not fool yourself, and
[when it comes to things you want very much to believe] you are the easiest
person (for you) to fool."^'' Romanek, by May 1997, was willing to say, "I agree
with people that say that PAHs are probably one of the worst things to look at
as a type of biomarker compound."^^

The Mars Rock 193

Early rounds of critical reaction began to appear in print very quickly. ^^
Many cited the work by Ralph Harvey and Harry McSween from July 1996
which implied that the carbonate globules formed by a high-temperature pro-
cess, in excess of 650°C, ruling out life. Romanek had mentioned this in the
initial paper but stated that his measurements by an alternate method suggested
a low-temperature origin; therefore, this dispute to some extent amounted to trust-
ing one lab or method over another. At the annual Lunar and Planetary Science
Conference (LPSC) in March and April 1997 at the JSC evidence was presented
from many labs, but the results were evenly divided in favor of a low-tempera-
ture and high-temperature origin.^^ This issue still remains unresolved, but there
is sufficient evidence to make a low-temperature origin a viable possibility.^*

At the 1997 LPSC two further criticisms had been fielded: first, Harvey
and McSween said they did observe the kind of magnetite crystals which the
McKay team had described. They said, however, that in addition to those shapes
(sometimes associated with biogenic activity) they saw a "whole zoo" of dif-
ferent shapes of magnetite crystals.^' Furthermore, many of the crystals, includ-
ing the supposedly biogenic type, contained defects of a kind that should not
be present if they were crystallized in the stable environment inside a cell.
CalTech specialist in paleomagnetism Joseph Kirschvink, who had studied the
magnetites made by terrestrial bacteria in great detail, objected that sometimes
biogenic crystals were produced outside the cells, resulting in a fairly wide range
of shapes. This would support the McKay team's interpretation. But Harvey
"highlighted a particular defect called a 'screw dislocation' . . . that has never
been linked to biogenic magnetite."^" Defects that serious were a difficult prob-
lem for the McKay team. They could maintain that not all the magnetite crys-
tals originally targeted as biogenic had to be biogenic, but the more strained
the argument became in this way, the less convincing it was, even to those who
had not initially been deeply skeptical.

In addition to the temperature and the magnetite, John Bradley of Geor-
gia Tech, Harvey, and McSween advanced a detailed argument explaining how
the visual nanostructures in the electron micrographs of ALH84001 could be
entirely explained, they claimed, as side and angled views of finely layered crys-
tal structures and protruding ledges along fracture planes in pyroxene and "mag-
netite whisker" minerals. These appearances were further stilted in a deceptive
direction by the gold/palladium coating used for electron microscopy, which can
produce segmented-looking coatings like that of the compelling image that had
been dubbed the Worm (see fig 8.1, image in background). This critique was
published a few months later, in December 1997.*' Four of the Mars meteorite
authors responded in the same venue; they showed that the suggested artifac-
tual explanation was by no means conclusive, though any but a technical expert
in microscopy and/or mineralogy might be left wondering which argument was
more persuasive.*^ Apparently at the scale of observation in question, phenomena
are quite complex and ambiguities in interpreting the data common. A confer-
ence was held at JSC on 2-4 November 1998 on the state of the evidence.

194 The Living Universe

"Martian Meteorites: Where Do We Stand and Where Are We Going?" By that
time the McKay team did seem to accept that a certain number of its original
putative nanobacteria images, especially those in which multiple cells appeared
to be oriented in parallel, probably were examples of that kind of artifact.^^

From the beginning much of the criticism was directed at the entire con-
cept of nanobacteria. Although varying in the degree to which they thought it
impermissible to speculate, most scientists echoed the original criticism Schopf
had brought forward at the August 1996 press conference: namely, something
as small as a rod 20 nanometers wide and 100 nanometers long is simply so
small that it has no space for even the minimal required biochemical molecules
to be alive.^ "Such an 'organism' would be two orders of magnitude smaller
than the smallest known one-celled organisms on Earth, mycoplasma," said
Harold Morowitz.^^ Robert Folk and several others in the geology community
had reported such tiny structures, but at least some reports from the biomedical
community also supported the claim that nanobacteria might exist.** New reports
began to come in and to receive much more attention because of the contro-
versy generated by the Mars meteorite claims.*^ Kuopio University, Finland,
microbiologist Olavi Kajander said that it had been difficult even to get such
observations published before; peer reviewers simply rejected them out of hand
rather than allowing them into print, where they could be judged in the court of
public science.*^ In October 1998 the National Academy of Sciences, at the
request of NASA, convened an expert panel to review existing evidence and
come to some conclusions about what the minimum size range credible for life
really is.*'

The NAS panel included eighteen experts on microbial life, among them
Norman Pace and John Baross. After a month of deliberations they embraced a
lower cutoff size for life equivalent to the volume of a sphere 200 nanometers
in diameter. And at the NASA Martian meteorites meeting of early November
1998 it sounded as though the ALH84001 team had moved a considerable way
in that direction. At that meeting David McKay said, of anything smaller than a
100-nanometer sphere, "We simply don't believe [it] is indicative of bacteria."
Science commentator Richard Kerr noted, "That criterion eliminates the objects
in the [1996] Science paper as well as 'The Worm,' which is 250 nm long but
too slender to make the cut."'"' McKay, however, did not completely abandon
the claim of possible nanobacteria. "We think there are large objects that are
still candidates," he said, though he demurred on providing any specific evidence
of examples at that time. He also opined that the original "ovoids" and rods might
be parts of Martian bacteria.^' If this sounds like top-of-the-head improvising
by one stuck in a tight comer, we must also note that, by the time the NAS
panel's report on nanobacteria appeared at the end of 1999, their own 200 nano-
meter published figure was also being finessed to leave some "wiggle room,"
particularly on account of Philippa Uwins's reported nanobes (in 1998) from
Australian rocks. They held that "known terrestrial bacteria in the range of 200
nm probably marked the lower size limit for current life, but held out the possi-

The Mars Rock J 95

bility that primitive unknown microbes might have been as small as 50 nm, about
the size of the Australian nanobes."^^ John Baross, interviewed by the New York
Times, repeatedly emphasized a 100 nanometer bottom line, exactly where
McKay had left his claim a year previously^^ And, again unintentionally echo-
ing McKay, Baross speculated: '"We have to think about them [nanobes] in a
different way, and one is that they are components' that function as a living or-
ganism only in totality, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts."

In the report a colleague on the NAS panel, Pittsburgh University biolo-
gist Jeffrey Lawrence, "laid out a detailed analysis of such hypothetical com-
munity life made up of extraordinarily tiny components, calling the aggregate a
meta-cell."'''* In a similar vein, after an April 1997 JSC meeting on the Early
History of Mars, one thought about the nanostructures in ALH84001 was
"whether the 20 nm structures could represent not fully functioning microbes
but important nonliving prebiotic structures, such as membrane-defined struc-
tures, on the road to life."^^ In many ways NASA Exobiology-funded work pre-
pared the way for this kind of novel reconceptualizing about life. Consider
Margulis's work on understanding eukaryotic cells as endosymbiotic commu-
nities in an analogous way as well work on microbial mats as holistic ecologi-
cal communities and on biofilms. But suffice it to say: the jury is still out on
nanobacteria.

Frances Westall, a JSC colleague who worked on electron microscopy of
very small potential microfossils, became interested in the ALH84001 results
and began collaborating with the McKay team on trying to study in detail the
processes by which microfossils form (e.g., silicification of bacterial cells)^^ in
order to develop a set of criteria for recognizing extraterrestrial microfossils.''''
Similarly, a persistent and constructive skeptic of the ALH84001 claims,''^
cosmochemist and meteorite specialist Peter Buseck of the Geology and Chem-
istry Departments at Arizona State University in 2002 launched a project under
NASA Astrobiology funds to study "nanoscale minerals as biomarkers."^' Un-
der another concurrent grant from NASA Cosmochemistry, Buseck is investi-
gating "the reactions and distribution of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and
fullerenes in extraterrestrial material."^" Whatever the outcome on nanobacteria
per se, the Mars meteorite claim does seem to be driving crucial parts of the
science of exobiology forward. This sentiment was expressed in a prominent
editorial in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science by editors Derek Sears
and William Hartmann: "The Antarctic meteorite Allan Hills 84001 may be at
the center of a revolution in our thinking about the origin of life on Earth, Mars
and perhaps elsewhere. This is not because of the attention given by non-
scientists to last summer's paper on this meteorite, but because it has forced
a reexamination of the importance of microbes in the ecosystem, the nature
of the smallest possible life forms, the nature of organic materials and struc-
tures that led to the origins of life and the temperature regime at which life
originated."^'

To return to this very fruitful criticism: the McKay team was frequently

196 The Living Universe

criticized for not citing in their paper the 1989 "false alarm" on PAHs in
EETA79001. Jeffrey Bada of the exobiology NSCORT in San Diego, the chief
critic of that earlier claim, who convinced most scientists that those PAHs were
contaminants that had seeped into the earlier Mars rock with Antarctic meltwa-
ter, now attacked the ALH84001 evidence on the same grounds. Because
ALH84001 contained a limited assortment of PAHs quite similar to the ones
reported in the earlier meteorite claim and because Bada's team showed that
suite of PAH molecules to be present also in samples of Antarctic ice, Bada's
group suggested terrestrial contamination was just as likely this time to be the
source. Regarding the fact that the concentration of PAHs was greatest in asso-
ciation with the carbonate globules and practically nil on the outermost layer of
the meteorite, Bada suggested that a chemical explanation was more likely than
shared biogenic origin: PAH molecules preferentially adsorb to carbonates by a
purely physico-chemical affinity. ^^ Romanek replied:

Well, that's true, but PAHs are hydrophobic molecules; they don't like
water. They want to be adsorbed to anything that is non-aqueous. And
so what needs to be done now is . . . to look at other components of
the meteorite — the fusion crust, the orthopyroxene ground mass — and
perform these same experiments and see if PAH is preferentially
adsorbed to those materials. I . . . strongly suspect that they will, be-
cause of this hydrophobic nature. . . . And so that kind of casts doubt
. . . into whether this process of transporting PAHs into the meteorite
from the Antarctic ice is the actual process that generated these con-
centrations that we measured in the carbonates. At this point in time,
I'm not convinced of that at all. If these experiments do come out and
show [what I predict] . . . , I've got to go with the idea that they're
indigenous to Mars.^^

As the individual lines of evidence began to fray and seemed increasingly
strained, the "spatial arrangement" argument also lost favor. Science reporter
Kerr, apparently himself fairly skeptical, noted at the November 1998 NASA
Mars meteorite conference at JSC, "even two years ago, many researchers were
unimpressed with that holistic argument. 'I never bought the reasoning that the
compounding of inconclusive arguments is conclusive,' says petrologist Edward
Stolper of [CalTech]. And it was clear at the workshop that now, as pieces of
the argument weaken, it is losing its grip over the rest of the community."^'*

Despite the skepticism of the Bada group and others, there can be no doubt
that, in the best tradition of science, the ALH84001 results provoked them to
do a lot of new work, searching for indigenous and/or contaminant organics in
Mars meteorites. And, indeed, they found what appeared to be almost entirely
contaminant (overwhelmingly the L-isomer) amino acids in both ALH84001 and
Nakhla.^5 This represented substantial progress, however, in understanding Mars
meteorites. More than that, the Bada team observed that "the rapid amino acid

The Mars Rock 197

contamination of Martian meteorites after direct exposure to the terrestrial
environment has important implications for Mars sample-return missions and
the curation of the samples from the time of their delivery to Earth."^^ They
suggested that any strategy for seeking organics on Mars must focus only "on
compounds that are readily synthesized under plausible prebiotic conditions, are
abundant in carbonaceous meteorites, and play an essential role in biochemistry."^^

Similarly critical, longtime meteorite researcher and NASA Exobiology
grantee John Kerridge of UCSD concluded from the ALH84001 debate that
Martian sedimentary rocks precipitated from solution were by far the most likely
to be fossiUferous rocks worth sampling. Thus, Kerridge urged, finding sites from
orbit that are clearly dried up sea- or lake-beds should precede any attempt at
sample collection. ^^

Furthermore, he noted, the remarkable popular interest generated by the
1996 announcement was an important contribution in itself. Even the enthusi-
asm for life on Mars which convinced the taxpayers to spend a billion dollars
on Viking was not nearly as great as the outpouring of interest since August 1996,
opined Kerridge. And in a science in which public funding was crucial, this was
no side issue. The 1993 congressional cancellation of NASA SETI funding was
a constant reminder of the flip side of this same coin. Six months after the ini-
tial press conference he thought about McKay's group that "they demonstrated
beyond a shadow of a doubt that the public wants us to do this. And that is go-
ing to make it much easier for us to get money out of Capitol Hill than we've
ever done before."^'

Less deeply skeptical about the science of the JSC team, former Exobiol-
ogy chief Donald DeVincenzi came to almost the same conclusions in May 1997.
The ALH84001 paper produced debate of the healthiest kind, he thought: "It's
. . . absolutely amazing. It has stimulated so much research, ... a whole new
field of research. It's demonstrated that we're going to have our hands full when
we get a protected Mars sample back on Earth. Here we've got the thing [i.e.,
the meteorite] in our hands with all the power on this planet, and we still don't
know if [the 1996 claim is] right or wrong yet, we really don't. And to me that's
a tremendously important non-finding, that nine months later we still don't know
the answer. And here we are saying, jeez, we really want to get some Mars
sample back here in 2005, and we know what to do with it. Yeah, right. I would
think we don't yet, but we will by then. I think this is a good case in point.'''^

The lessons from ALH84001 will surely vastly improve preparedness for
obtaining informative Mars samples, no matter who turns out to be correct about
different aspects of the original 1996 claim. Even after only a few years the de-
bate has already had a large salutary effect in this direction.

DeVincenzi also compared the ALH84001 findings to the first results of
the Viking lander biology experiments, noting many striking parallels. The first
appearance of the evidence was strikingly biological in both cases. "And then
three years later they were still arguing about that [the LR results], but now after

198 The Living Universe

three years of intensive research, there was a new theory. And it's a chemistry
explanation. But it's not simple, it's complicated, and you need three different
oxidants in order to explain all the results. Three. Not one. ... I think maybe
that's what's going to happen here, that it really is going to take a lot of differ-
ent lines of evidence, and if it does come up negative it's going to be like the
Viking thing; there'll be more or less an extraordinary negative explanation for
these extraordinary results. . . . It's not going to be just a simple explanation, I
don't think."5'

It should be noted, however, that the issues involved in the controversy
have turned out to be much more complex than either side initially envisioned.
Even given three or four separate lines of evidence in dispute, opinions that the
debate would be resolved within a year or two have turned out to be excessively
optimistic. By the November 1998 NASA meeting McKay thought that sorting
out the ALH84001 results might be work for the next five, maybe ten, years. A
majority within the exobiology research community probably currently consid-
ers that the ALH84001 evidence leans strongly against biogenic activity as the
most likely explanation. But this consensus appeared even more strongly nega-
tive in late 1998 than a mere four years later. ^^ And in February 2001 an inde-
pendent research team under Imre Friedmann produced new evidence about the
magnetite crystals, which gave new vigor (if not complete resuscitation) to the
possibility that the Mars rock actually might contain microfossils.'^

A team led by Kathie Thomas-Keprta also published the results of new,
much more detailed studies on the magnetite grains in the Mars rock, arguing
that they "were likely produced as a biogenic process." As such, they argued,
the crystals represented "Martian magnetofossils and constitute evidence of the
oldest life yet found."^"* Friedmann's group found one of the things critics of
the biogenic magnetite had been demanding: in samples in which magnetotactic
bacteria produced the granules, they were found in the dead cells, just as in life,
hned up in chains. Thomas-Keprta's group said that some 75 percent of the mag-
netite crystals in the carbonate globule rims were, as critics alleged, of inor-
ganic origin. They still held that 25 percent of the crystals were so identical in
shape and structure to those from known magnetotactic bacteria that they were
overwhelmingly likely to be of biogenic origin. Some life was breathed back
into the Mars rock, it seemed, at least initially.^^

Yet many remained cautious about the Martian "pearl chains."'* For those
who had watched the original four lines of evidence weakened one by one, as
biochemist and meteorite organics expert John Cronin saw it, "as to the magne-
tite chains, it seems that the life of ALH84001 now hangs by these slim chains,
a miniscule component of the meteorite, even of the meteorite total magnetite.
At best, I doubt that they will ever fully meet the Sagan requirement of extraor-
dinary evidence for an extraordinary claim. ALH 84001 was bom with a bang
but seems destined to die with a whimper."'^ Cronin's opinion was largely shared
by Peter Buseck, who studied these magnetites in some detail and was launch-
ing into a new, and it was hoped, definitive study in early 2002.'* By contrast.

The Mars Rock 199

Joseph Kirschvink, the magnetite expert at CalTech, was now a supporter of
the biogenic view.

The complexity of the issues, pushing the limits of available technology,
has only been one dimension of the Mars rock story. Science historian and phi-
losopher Iris Fry has observed, "At the same time, the persistence of McKay's
team in its original contention despite the harsh criticism addressed against it
clearly transcends the empirical issues involved and demonstrates the sociol-
ogy of science at work. A great deal is at stake here in addition to the major
question being addressed. . . . money, ambition and politics are all involved in
this project."'^

One might add that the degree of invective among their opponents also
illustrates commitments above and beyond the evidence. It has taken two to tango
in jacking up the level of personal sensitivity in the debate. And most of the
opponents, as well as the McKay team, are NASA grantees; neither side has
lost work from NASA by taking one side or the other. Given the level of public
interest in the topic, that situation seems likely to continue.

As if to emphasize that controversy is the norm in science, one of J. Will-
iam Schopf 's most renowned discoveries, the 3.45 billion-year-old Apex Chert
microfossils (discussed in chap. 5), was called into question even as the Mars
rock outcome remained unresolved. Much to the surprise of the exobiology com-
munity, a paleofossil research group led by Martin Brasier of Oxford Univer-
sity announced in March 2002 that the fossils listed as the world's oldest in the
Guinness Book of World Records might not be fossils at all but mere inorganic
deposits of graphite or of organic matter produced abiotically by a Miller-Urey-
type synthesis in hydrothermal vent waters.'"** Examining the original type speci-
mens Schopf had deposited at the Natural History Museum in London as well
as the rocks in their original geological setting, Brasier's group claimed that
Schopf had incorrectly believed the rocks to be from a shallow sea bottom and
the putative microfossils to be cyanobacteria. They also found many of the sup-
posed bacterial filaments to be irregularly branched and/or folded in ways not
seen in those organisms; the "fossils," they thought, were much more likely de-
posits of organic material around the edges of crystals which gave the appear-
ance of living cells in much the same way that Bradley, Harvey, and McSween
had posited for the Mars rock "nanofossils." The Schopf group at UCLA and
another group at the University of Alabama-Birmingham were informed about
the Brasier results, submitted to Nature on 14 February 2001. They had begun
studying the Apex chert fossils with Laser-Raman spectroscopy to determine
the nature of the organic material of the fossils in situ and differentiate it from
that of the surrounding rock matrix. They submitted a manuscript to Nature
which effectively addressed the Brasier claims, and the papers were published
side by side in the same issue.'*" Jill Pasteris, a Washington University scientist
with twenty years of experience in Laser-Raman spectroscopy, has expressed
skepticism about Schopf's interpretation of its results. Thus, the controversy
continued.'**^

200 The Living Universe

More than one commentator noted the irony that for Schopf, who had built
his reputation on debunking mistaken microfossil claims and establishing the
criteria to determine fossil from artifact, the "extraordinary claims" shoe now
seemed to be on the other foot.'^^ Some argued that, because Schopf 's fossils
were from Earth, not Mars, his claim was not "extraordinary" in the same way
as the McKay team's and thus should not require the same extraordinary stan-
dard of proof. But for one who had so freely wielded the argument in his 1999
book as well as against those whose terrestrial paleofossil claims he disagreed
with, this did not appear quite symmetrical to many observers. Some claimed
that at the very least Schopf 's implication that the Apex chert organisms were
photosynthetic was no longer valid; if the formation was a deep-sea hydrother-
mal vent, there would have been insufficient light for photosynthesis. 'O'*

In a second episode with some parallel features geologists Chris Fedo and
Martin Whitehouse took a much closer look at another recent spectacular claim
about the most ancient evidence for life on Earth. In 1996 a team at the NASA
NSCORT led by Gustaf Arrhenius's student Steve Mojzsis claimed to have found
carbon isotope evidence for biotic organic carbon in the 3.85 billion-year-old
rocks of Akilia Island, Greenland, pushing the date for presumptive life on Earth
back farther than Schopf 's fossils by another 400 million years, to the time imme-
diately after the heavy bombardment of Earth by meteorites ceased. "^^ Mojzsis
accepted previous identifications of the rock layer as a sedimentary banded iron
formation (BIF), generally thought credible at that time. He and his team ar-
gued that the apatite crystals in which the carbon was found would be resistant
to meta-morphism.

When Fedo and Whitehouse closely examined the rocks in question in their
geological context, however, they found persuasive evidence that the rocks were
highly metamorphosed and not sedimentary in origin. No fossils could possibly
have been preserved in that rock, they claimed; any carbon left would be so
altered from metamorphism over almost four billion years that it would be un-
safe to draw any conclusions about its origin. Their paper in the 24 May 2002
Science cautioned that any rock needs to be studied in the field in its full con-
text, rather than just in the laboratory. Although the controversy is still unre-
solved, it seems clear at this point that the interpretation of the rocks and any
carbon they contain is more ambiguous and open to multiple readings than was
first thought. '°"^

This episode strikingly echoes the qualifier with which the Mars meteor-
ite group opened its 1996 paper: that the researchers knew nothing about the
geological context on Mars from which the rock originally came. Science writer
Richard Kerr of Science found Fedo and Whitehouse's criticisms credible and
drew several parallels between all three cases: Schopf's Apex chert claims,
ALH84001, and the Mojzsis claim. '°'' Still, on the greater lesson for exobiol-
ogy and for science in general, all parties are in striking agreement. George Cody
of the Carnegie Institute, Washington, D.C., says: "I don't believe any of the
evidence from the Martian meteorite, ... but it's been the biggest boon for space

The Mars Rock 201

science. It got us thinking."'"^ The McKay team sees the same big picture.
"Whether we are right or wrong," says Everett Gibson, "the scientific commu-
nity will be better prepared for that day when samples from Mars will be re-
turned to Earth for study. In addition, new ways are being developed which
permit the scientific community to seek the signatures for life. We feel a bite of
personal pride inside because of what we have accomplished."""

Chapter 9

T^naissance

From Exobiology to Astrobiology

"The

'he year 1995 looms large in the history
of exobiology. In that year, seven months before the announcement of the first
planet around a Sun-like star and more than a year before the infamous Mars
rock episode, the young discipline began to reinvent itself based primarily on
the threat of a deep administrative upheaval at NASA. Out of a NASA-wide
reevaluation of the agency known as the "zero-base review," and the resulting
tumultuous experience for NASA Ames Research Center in California, emerged
a new word in the exobiology lexicon, astrobiology, which redefined the bound-
aries and the concept of exobiology. By 1996 a workshop had made a first at-
tempt to define astrobiology, by spring 1998 a virtual Astrobiology Institute
embraced a geographically diverse number of institutions and individuals, and
by late 1998 scientists from a variety of fields had constructed a general roadmap
for the discipline. The buildup of astrobiology was remarkably swift, fed by the
intense excitement surrounding the discovery of planetary systems, the contro-
versy over the Mars rock, the possibility of an ocean on Europa, and research
on life in extreme environments among other developments, including the
biotech revolution spawned by the Human Genome Project. While the ultimate
outcome of this activity was still in doubt at the turn of the millennium, it is
clear that in the aftermath of these events exobiology would never again be the
same. These unexpected events not only mark the latest chapter in the four-
decade history of exobiology; they also provide a further revealing window on
scientific discipline building and hint at a "great age of discovery" which aims
to place life in a cosmic context.

Crisis at Ames

In the mid-1990s NASA was facing massive budget cuts from Congress.
Administrator Daniel Goldin had submitted a budget for fiscal 1994 which re-
duced NASA's budget by fifteen billion dollars over five years — a significant

202

Renaissance 203

cut for a budget then running at about fourteen billion dollars annually. Two
years later he reduced NASA's budget again by ordering the redesign of the In-
ternational Space Station and canceling programs. But Congress kept the pres-
sure on NASA's budget, and Goldin decided to streamline NASA's structure
through a zero-base review, one that started from ground zero rather than from
the previous year's budget.'

It was in this context that, on 2 February 1995, a NASA "Red Team" white
paper was produced that immediately spread fear across the agency. Entitled
"A Budget Reduction Strategy" and drafted by NASA deputy chief of space-
flight Richard Wisniesk, the purpose of the paper was "to provide a starting point
for discussions on a proposed realignment of center roles and missions." The
self-described driving force for the paper was the constrained budget environ-
ment, and the paper was meant to communicate "NASA's commitment for revo-
lutionary change" across the agency. Among the overarching principles of the
plan were that NASA would maintain its in-house capabilities to perform re-
search and development and that operations would be accomplished through the
commercial sector. But the report stated pointedly that "the luxury, and perhaps
the wisdom, of overlapping roles at the Field Centers is no longer an option."
As part of the streamlining of functions, Ames was to remain the lead center
for aerodynamics and aviation human factors. But Ames was to drop its programs
in Mission to Planet Earth and in life and planetary sciences. Equally large
changes were to take place at other field centers. NASA teams already in place,
the paper ominously promised, would fully review and evaluate the proposals
for feasibility.^

At Ames, center director Ken Munechika assigned Bill Berry, acting di-
rector of the Space Directorate, the task of taking action under the "ZBR" guide-
lines. Taking those guidelines seriously, he had little choice but to develop what
amounted to a going-out-of-business plan for his directorate, which included life,
space, and Earth sciences. Because Goddard had a big Earth science contingent,
JPL a big planetary science / space science contingent, and Johnson Space Center
a very large life science group, the plan was to parse each of these functions
out to other centers, consistent with the aims of the zero-base review team. But,
when Berry circulated a draft of the plan to his division chiefs in mid-March,
they balked. Lynn Harper, then acting chief of the Advanced Life Support Di-
vision at Ames, resisted the drastic implications and urged a new strategy: to
argue that the manifold activities at Ames were not a weakness but a strength,
that interdisciplinary research was more important, indeed more productive, than
fencing research within traditional disciplinary boxes, provided that Ames use
this strength to focus on a single topic — life in the universe.

Such a strategy was not new; Harper recalled that it was part of the phi-
losophy enunciated by John Billingham in connection with the NASA SETI pro-
gram he had headed at Ames beginning in the 1 970s: "Billingham was always
convinced, and convinced me, that if you attempt to understand life in the uni-
verse then you have to have all of the pieces — life on the cosmic scale, the

204 The Living Universe

planetary scale, the organism scale, and the volition or the purpose or the intel-
ligence piece of it that manages evolution if it wants to do so. Those pieces were
so powerful and important, both as a scientific discipline and for what it offers
to humanity, offers to the future of my kids, that it would be wrong to break up
that unique capability." In support of this philosophy Billingham had organized
numerous workshops, including the influential ECHO report on the Evolution
of Complex and Higher Organisms which foreshadowed some of astrobiology's
themes. In this sense Billingham may be considered the father, or one of sev-
eral parents, of astrobiology.' The tools to carry out such a research program
were now much advanced over the 1970s, and the opportunity was at hand if
only it were seized.

Ames management, faced with convincing Dan Goldin and other high-
level administrators in NASA that Ames's expertise in life. Earth, and space sci-
ences was unique within the agency, seized on a redefined exobiology to play a
crucial integrating role. This strategy was risky at best, both personally for the
individuals involved and for Ames as an institution. As we have seen in chapter
2, from the early 1960s Ames had always been NASA's focus in exobiology, a
focus that admittedly had become fuzzy and weakened in the disappointing af-
termath of Viking. As one NASA insider put it, space science, with its flashy
results, was the glittering jewel of NASA, while life science was somewhere
down in the pond scum. Yet exobiology remained the very definition of an inter-
disciplinary endeavor, and, if that activity could be revamped, strengthened, and
put in the context of real space missions, it could be the savior of the Ames
Research Center. It was in recognition of the capability for mission-oriented
multidisciplinary research across all three lines, Ames management argued, that
NASA should not only keep Ames open but should assign to it a newly strength-
ened endeavor termed life in the universe. Luckily, their emphasis on biology
was attuned to Dan Goldin's thinking, and as administrator his opinion counted
for a great deal.'*

Such an argument was entirely counter to the guidelines of the zero-base
review. But it was exactly the argument Ames managers made at an extraordi-
nary weekend meeting at Ames on 26-27 March 1995, when they briefed NASA
chief scientist France Cordova, the associate administrators for Space Science
(Wes Huntress), Life and Microgravity Science (Harry Holloway), and Earth
Science (Bill Townsend), and others who had gathered to decide how Ames was
going to dispose of the pieces of its program. This fateful meeting, at which
Berry made the key presentation (written primarily by Lynn Harper, who inte-
grated discipline-specific input from the Ames Science Advisory Council), was
a turning point and the origin of Ames's mission lead for astrobiology. Instead
of presenting a going-out-of-business plan. Berry presented a "Life in the Uni-
verse" plan, backed up by the Ames Science Advisory Council. The council,
chaired by Muriel Ross, gave in-depth technical presentations based on their
study of what science could be done if disciplines were merged at Ames with

Renaissance 205

no barriers to drawing on talent and resources. The arguments found favor with
Huntress, Cordova, and eventually Goldin. It was at this meeting that Huntress
remarked that he disliked the term life in the universe and suggested that astro-
biology be used instead. In April the zero-base review team at NASA headquarters
in Washington, D.C., recommended that Ames be given the lead in astrobiol-
ogy, and on 19 May Goldin made the formal announcement. At the same time,
Ames was also given the lead in information sciences, on which the new biol-
ogy of the biotech revolution was heavily dependent.^

A Dear Colleague letter dated 30 May from Associate Administrator for
Space Science Wes Huntress, entitled "Space Science and the Zero Base Re-
view," introduced another new concept while making the first official use at
NASA of the word astrobiology. The Space Science program at Ames, it held,
would be privatized by forming an institute through a consortium of Bay Area
universities and local industry. The virtual institute concept was initiated because
it was unlikely that Ames would ever get the hiring authority needed to do the
job. Harper and Kathleen Connell did the feasibility assessments in April 1995,
including the legal precedents that would allow the creation of the institute. In
November 1995 David Morrison, Scott Hubbard, Joan Vemikos, and Estelle
Condon were among the Ames personnel who served on formal committees to
create the institute. Although the nature of the organization would later be re-
defined, this was the beginning of the idea of an Astrobiology Institute. The letter
further defined the scope of the field, stating that the new entity would "have
prime responsibility for the 'Origin and Distribution of Life in the Universe'
theme, and will be the lead NASA Center for astrobiology and astrochemistry,
areas in which ARC has developed unique, world-class expertise. Specialty ar-
eas include cosmochemistry, chemical evolution, the origin and evolution of life,
planetary biology and chemistry, formation of stars and planets (space science),
and expansion of terrestrial life into space."^

Defining Astrobiology and Building a Program

In a four-month period from February to May 1995 Ames had escaped
disaster. Instead of drastically reducing the scope of its work, the center now
set about building the new program in astrobiology. Essential to that process
was defining astrobiology. Already in the 1996 NASA Strategic Plan, in which
the word astrobiology was used for the first time in a published agency docu-
ment after Huntress's unpublished letter to colleagues, the focus was on the key
questions, recognizing that too broad a program was no program at all when it
came to limitations of funding. Astrobiology was the "study of the living uni-
verse" to be sure, but in particular it was seen as providing the scientific foun-
dation for the study of the origin and distribution of life in the universe, the
role of gravity in living systems, and the study of the Earth's atmosphere and
ecosystems. These three programs were already in existence, but astrobiology

206 The Living Universe

was to go beyond them, asking questions that require the sharing of knowledge,
resources, and talents of existing programs and striking out in new directions
as well 7

Even the focus on key questions left a broad scope and much room for
interpretation. In mid-1997 Don DeVincenzi, head of the Space Sciences Divi-
sion at Ames, admitted: "I have a fairly good view of what astrobiology is. But
I don't know that anybody else particularly subscribes to my definition. Every-
body's got their own definition, you know. Some people look at it as an um-
brella for everything; from the big bang to today, and I don't take that view, I
don't think that's what Goldin meant, and I don't think that's what is appropri-
ate." In DeVincenzi's view the Origins program was the broad umbrella, while
astrobiology was intended to be a more limited program to focus on biology
and the origin, evolution, and distribution of life. It was to be broader than the
old exobiology but more confined than the whole of Origins. Exobiology as
funded from headquarters had not paid much attention to the origin of planets
but had been following the history of carbon. Exobiology funding from NASA
had traditionally ended with the earliest ecologies on the planet, about 3.5 bil-
lion years ago. By contrast astrobiology wished to place the origin of life in the
context of the environment in which it happened. In this sense planetary origins
and evolution became an essential component of astrobiology, at least as they
related to the conditions of habitability. Furthermore, astrobiology aspired to
address questions beyond early ecologies to the origin and evolution of higher
life forms. In other words, exobiology was the core of astrobiology but would
now be placed in the context of evolving planetary environments. One could
ask how gravity and radiation shape the origin and evolution of life on Earth
and elsewhere, address the origin and evolution of ecosystems and global bio-
spheres, and even hope in the future to look for spectroscopic signatures of life
in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets.^

One thing is certain: in distinguishing exobiology from astrobiology, the
difference between a concept and a funded program was essential. As Lynn
Harper at Ames put it: "the sea change between exobiology and astrobiology
was the inclusion of Earth sciences and life sciences as part of the portfolio.
Conceptually, exobiology had always recognized them, but practically it didn't
develop them within that program umbrella. Astrobiology pulled them in hard
and made some conceptual advances based on the synergies between Earth sci-
ences and space sciences or Earth sciences and life sciences that had never oc-
curred before."' The definition and scope of astrobiology were not entirely
academic questions, for they played heavily into how NASA would build its
program. Indeed, some consensus on what astrobiology should become was nec-
essary to proceed at all.

The astrobiology plan was therefore much broader than exobiology as pre-
viously conceived in NASA. The exobiology program managed out of NASA
headquarters still thrived, under the management of Michael Meyer, at the level
of $8.4 million in 1997. This money funded about one hundred principal inves-

Renaissance 207

tigator proposals per year, and about one-third of the funding came to the exo-
biology effort at Ames, which had to compete for the money in the same peer-
review process as everyone else. A shift in emphasis had occurred in 1995, when
the exobiology NASA Research Announcement (NRA) indicated that the pro-
gram was seeking fewer proposals on the evolution of the biogenic elements,
because so much research had been done on the subject that the origin and evo-
lution of those elements was fairly well understood. "We wanted more constraint
to the program than that," Meyer recalled, "because we were getting too many
proposals. And most of them, although very good studies, wouldn't help very
much to answer 'How do you get life started in a planetary system?'" Exobiology
was recentered more on the origin of life — how polymers get put together, how
to get cell membranes, and the minimal living organism — as well as on trying
to understand Earth's early evolution.'"

Defining astrobiology would be an ongoing process. Meanwhile, with the
1996 NASA Strategic Plan as the enabling document giving Ames the astrobi-
ology mission, NASA went about building the discipline in several ways; by
developing internal consensus and funding, by involving the outside professional
community, and by engaging the public. None of these were easy or entirely
separable activities, but all were essential for success in the broadened discipline.

Inside NASA an essential element for the rapid rise of astrobiology was
the strong support of NASA administrator Dan Goldin. Goldin believed biol-
ogy was the science for the twenty-first century, advocated astrobiology enthu-
siastically in his speeches, and provided moral support. David Morrison, director
of space at Ames and one of the architects of astrobiology, remarked in 1997
that "the major commitment that Administrator Dan Goldin has made to biol-
ogy within NASA, to the Origins Program, to understanding the origin of life
on Earth, to exploiting the space station and its biological research capabilities,
to searching for habitable planets around other stars, as well as Mars explora-
tion, has all served to greatly invigorate exobiology and astrobiology in the last
year or two." "Goldin was pivotal," Lynn Harper recalled a few years later. "He
prevented us from being crushed or pulled apart by the organization. ... He ba-
sically said this is something he wants to see work . . . and then he spoke about
it well in places that needed to hear it and really helped make astrobiology hap-
pen. He never came through with money, but he helped." In late 1997 Goldin
was still lamenting that "the biological revolution has passed the space program
by." He wanted to change that, telling his Advisory Council he would like fund-
ing for the Astrobiology Institute to reach one hundred million dollars eventu-
ally. "You just wait for the screaming from the physical scientists [when that
happens]," he said."

From all appearances Goldin was truly interested, but the problem of fund-
ing, left to astrobiology's managers at a lower level, called for creative thinking.
It was one thing to declare that astrobiology should join Earth, space, and life
sciences in a common endeavor; it was quite another to secure funding commit-
ments from those three distinct organizational elements at NASA headquarters.

208 The Living Universe

Life and Microgravity Sciences, now under Amauld Nicogossian at headquar-
ters, was initially opposed to astrobiology. Nicogossian had his own programs
to fund and saw astrobiology as a competing program. The early reaction from
Earth Science was similar. Astrobiology found its first allies in Space Science
under Wesley Huntress, who, after all, had coined the word astrobiology and
given the go-ahead for it to proceed at Ames. There the Advanced Concepts and
Technology Division, under Peter Ulrich and Rick Howard, provided early fund-
ing for astrobiology at the level of about $100,000, parallel to the way in which
early SETI funding had come from the Office of Aeronautics and Space Tech-
nology (OAST) at NASA headquarters. The traditional exobiology program, also
under Space Science, was a logical source of funding, but its funds were com-
mitted for traditional areas of research, and in these early days its head, Michael
Meyer, may well have felt that what was happening at Ames in astrobiology
was beyond his control. Thus, for several years funding for astrobiology was
kluged together from a variety of sources whose managers believed in
astrobiology's promise and acted as its advocates. Astrobiology was able to suc-
ceed because a number of people each committed relatively small but important
amounts of funds to make specific activities succeed. Personalities and profes-
sional connections played a considerable role in this process. Mel Avemer, who
had managed the biosphere program at NASA and arrived at Ames as program
manager of fundamental biology in the midst of astrobiology's development,
acted as a kind of link to life sciences back at headquarters. He was also essen-
tial in providing funds from his program for astrobiology, especially those needed
to fund an essential series of workshops.'^

At NASA Ames the action in senior management fell to Henry McDonald,
Scott Hubbard, David Morrison, and Donald DeVincenzi. McDonald, who re-
placed Munechika in spring 1996 as Ames director, was an active advocate for
astrobiology — an essential advocacy if the discipline was to get off the ground
at Ames. Morrison, DeVincenzi, and Hubbard would each play essential roles
in their own way. Lynn Harper led the Astrobiology Advanced Missions and
Technology (AAMAT) group until September 1999, when Greg Schmidt took
over as head of what would be called the Astrobiology Integration Office. It
was the early AAMAT effort that commissioned the workshops, paid for initial
feasibility studies, and in general acted as the engine for moving astrobiology
more rapidly forward. The AAMAT group encouraged its members to recruit
science talent beyond the traditional NASA boundaries. With this encourage-
ment Emily Holton recruited two Nobel Prize winners, Baruch Blumberg and
Walter Gilbert, to chair one of the sessions at the Astrobiology Roadmap Work-
shop. It would be a historic meeting. Holton would again recruit Blumberg and
another Nobelist, Richard Roberts, to cochair a follow-on workshop to the
Roadmap, called Genomics on the International Space Station. This was com-
missioned by Harper, cofunded by AAMAT and Avemer, and paved the way
for Blumberg's eventual decision to head the Astrobiology Institute. A host of
managers and scientists helped guide astrobiology through its early birth, whether

Renaissance 209

in organizing workshops, providing money, doing research, or using their pro-
fessional contacts to advance the new discipline. If early astrobiology seems a
jumble of names with a variety of backgrounds and motivations and no central
brain, this is an accurate reflection of its origins; as Harper put it, astrobiology
was about constellations, not superstars.

Cooperation was necessary to make astrobiology work as an interdisci-
plinary endeavor. David Morrison, an early student of Carl Sagan and a pio-
neer in planetary science, was pivotal in this regard as one of the conceptual
leaders of astrobiology. As Harper recalled, Morrison "embraced the broad view
right from the beginning, and could see how all the pieces contributing together
provided some discovery opportunities scientifically that separating them really
didn't. These opportunities were exciting and they were new and they were im-
portant. . . . Morrison was able to articulate them in a very compelling way,
and helped in the communication of astrobiology to everybody, regardless of
their backgrounds." Moreover, "he was evenhanded with all of the [internal]
organizations. Astrobiology was such a fragile thing when it started. If Morrison
had supported space science at the expense of life science astrobiology would
have cratered, but he didn't ... he was the glue that held all of the pieces to-
gether Morrison really was the lead in important ways of the integration of the
effort."'^

An important exercise in consensus building occurred in September 1996,
when Ames hosted the first Astrobiology Workshop. DeVincenzi, who had a long
history in exobiology management and planetary contamination issues, played
a leading role in organizing this workshop. NASA's first attempt to court the
Earth, space, and life sciences in one gathering brought about one hundred in-
vited attendees, including twenty-three physicists and astronomers, thirty-seven
Earth and planetary scientists, and thirty-eight life scientists. The meeting was
organized around five major questions: (1) How does life originate? (2) Where
and how are other habitable worlds formed? (3) How have the Earth and its
biosphere influenced each other over time? (4) Can terrestrial life be sustained
beyond our planet? and (5) How can we expand the human presence to Mars?'"*
It is notable that at this stage of discipline building the sole stated goal was to
stimulate cross-disciplinary thinking and new ideas for research. The organiz-
ers made no attempt to reach consensus on research priorities, recommendations,
or funding requirements.

As another step in consensus building, Wes Huntress at headquarters dis-
patched Gerald Soffen, the former Viking science leader and now director of
University Programs at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center, around the coun-
try to build consensus on what astrobiology should be. Soffen consulted hun-
dreds of researchers and program managers, inside and outside NASA and by
mid-1997 had drafted a program plan. Noting that "we are entering a great age
of discovery in biology," the internal report viewed NASA's exobiology pro-
gram as being subsumed under the new field of astrobiology, noted that the time
was ripe because of recent discoveries, and advocated an increasing role for

210 The Living Universe

NASA because the agency's missions and technology would be needed to answer
some of astrobiology's fundamental questions. In viewgraphs that distilled the
program plan for headquarters discussions, Soffen enunciated six points for ac-
tion: (1) develop the scientific questions; (2) form a virtual institute; (3) find
the leaders; (4) develop young talent; (5) relate to NASA Mission where appro-
priate; and (6) relate to the rest of biology.'^

Meanwhile, activities at Ames were defining roles inside NASA. Lynn
Harper, a past SETI program manager at headquarters who had also worked in
exobiology. Earth sciences, and life sciences and appreciated the value of
multidisciplinary work, was one of the principal behind-the-scenes architects of
the astrobiology program. It was she who first articulated many of the principles
under which astrobiology operated as part of an "Astrobiology Development
Plan" written during 1997. Incorporating input from many other scientists both
inside and outside NASA, the document set forth the recommendations of Ames
for the science and technical content of a national program in astrobiology and
how it should be implemented. The program was to be built on NASA's four
"Strategic Enterprises" as set forth in the 1996 NASA Strategic Plan: Earth Sci-
ence, Space Science, Human Exploration and Development of Space, and Aero-
space Technology. The development plan viewed astrobiology as an emerging
"superdiscipline" that cut across many disciplinary boundaries. Its scope once
again was defined as the origin, evolution, and destiny of life, where destiny
was defined as "making the long term-occupation of space a reality and laying
the foundation for understanding and managing changes in Earth's environment."
The program implementation was to involve ground-based, airborne, and space
flight research and technology, spread across the Earth, life, and space sciences,
with education and public outreach as fully integrated elements of the program.'*

Under the general scope of the origin, evolution, and destiny of life, the
development plan set forth a breathtaking array of eleven "scientific challenges,"
ranging from understanding the formation of planetary systems to the evolu-
tion of Earth's biosphere for its first billion years, the evolution of life beyond
Earth, and the ability to sustain life beyond Earth. In keeping with its space mis-
sion cutting across all NASA strategic enterprises, the plan emphasized how its
goals could be accomplished with missions planned or already in development.
In studying how to sustain life beyond Earth, the International Space Station
was seen as "an essential evolutionary test-bed" for research on the effect of
the space environment in biological evolution. The Mars Sample Return mis-
sion had the potential to provide an unambiguous answer about extant or ex-
tinct life on Mars. And the human exploration of Mars tapped into a long-held
part of the American psyche fed from Lowell to Bradbury to Viking. The mis-
sion details, however, were yet to be developed. Scott Hubbard, who had been
the originator of the Mars Pathfinder during its formative stages at Ames and
had served as the mission manager for the equally successful Lunar Prospec-
tor, played a key role in this regard, providing expertise in relating astrobiology
to real missions. Mission relatedness also provided astrobiology credibility within

Renaissance 211

NASA; any concept that could not utilize spaceflight was a hard sell within a
space agency. Astrobiology's first mission, an airborne sortie to observe the Le-
onid meteors predicted to "storm" in November 1998, was a good example of
the extended reach of the new discipline. "The central theme of this mission
was astrobiology," said principal investigator Peter Jenneskins. "We were espe-
cially interested in learning the composition of [comet] Tempel-Tuttle's debris,
the molecules that were created during the meteors' interaction with Earth's at-
mosphere, and the composition and chemistry of the atoms, molecules and par-
ticles detected in the meteors' path. We hope this will help us understand how
extraterrestrial materials may have helped create the conditions on Earth neces-
sary for the origin of life. The mission also sought clues about how biogenic
compounds formed in stars are eventually incorporated into planets."'^

From a content point of view Ames's Astrobiology Development Plan en-
visioned building on the traditional exobiology program, as well as a new ini-
tiative in evolutionary biology, while integrating Earth, life, and space sciences.
It envisioned strong collaboration with the university community to develop
undergraduate and graduate training for the next generation of multidisciplinary
scientists. And, although Ames was to be NASA's lead center for astrobiology,
JPL, the Johnson Space Center, and the Goddard Spaceflight Center would also
be primary participants. If Edison invented the modem research laboratory and
E. O. Lawrence the modem large-scale multipurpose national laboratory, the plan
saw itself as creating a national "superlaboratory" that built on the advances
of information technology to enable a truly multidisciplinary approach to astro-
biology. The Astrobiology Institute would embody that new step in multi-
disciplinary cooperation.'^

Important as input for the Astrobiology Development Plan and in the
longer term for defining the scope and limits of the new discipline were a se-
ries of workshops held at Ames beginning in 1996. The earliest actually pre-
ceded the first astrobiology workshop by several months and was dubbed the
"Pale Blue Dot" workshop, referring to planet Earth as described in Carl Sagan's
1994 book with the same title. (Although Sagan was not directly involved in
the development of astrobiology at Ames, he was in many ways a guiding spirit,
even after his early death in 1996.) The goal of the Pale Blue Dot workshop
was to find and characterize habitable planets in other solar systems, other "pale
blue dots," with whatever techniques could be mustered. Related to this goal
was an "exozodiacal dust" workshop, held in 1997, which focused on the prob-
lem of dust interfering with the detection of planets.'^

In 1998, as it became evident that serious funding for astrobiology might
be forthcoming, the pace of workshops accelerated, and their scope widened. A
flurry of workshops commissioned by Harper and the co-leader she recraited,
Greg Schmidt, were led by Ames scientists and attended by govemment, uni-
versity, and industry representatives. A "Piggyback Missions" workshop identi-
fied opportunities for near-term astrobiology payloads on missions already
planned and evaluated the readiness of candidate payload technologies. A

212 The Living Universe

workshop on "Advanced Measurement Systems" characterized the state of tech-
nologies usable for astrobiology and brought in Defense Advanced Research
Project Agency (DARPA) superstars, with their ultraminiaturized detection sys-
tems. Another meeting on "Evolution and Development" evaluated astrobiol-
ogy opportunities related to the coevolution of life and the environment as well
as rapid change and ecosystem evolution. At the same time, a "Beyond Planet
of Origin" workshop evaluated mission opportunities to determine how life (in-
cluding terrestrial life) would evolve beyond its home planet. Also in 1998 two
workshops were held related to astrobiology and Mars and, in 1999, one on
"Genomics and the International Space Station"; the latter brought in Baruch
Blumberg again and led to his agreement to lead the institute. These workshops
played a key role in bringing people together from a variety of backgrounds
and crystallizing support for a broadly conceived astrobiology program. In some
cases they led to important and long-range elements for the astrobiology program:
the Advanced Measurement and Piggyback Missions workshops, chaired by John
Hines and K. R. Sridhar, resulted in the programs known as Astrobiology Sci-
ence and Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP) and Astrobiology Science
and Technology Instrument Development (ASTID). These programs, which
Schmidt, Michael Meyer, and David Lavery shepherded through Congress, pro-
vided astrobiology the critically needed resources for adapting the latest tech-
nology for mission use.

In addition to these workshops, other regularly scheduled meetings fed
into the new field and were in turn affected by it. In November 1997 the Sixth
Symposium on Chemical Evolution and the Origin and Evolution of Life met
at Ames. Because this triennial meeting involved most of the principal investi-
gators in NASA's exobiology program reporting on their recent research results,
it provided a good opportunity for early discussion of astrobiology. Indeed, in
opening remarks headquarters discipline scientist for exobiology, Michael Meyer,
discussed "Astrobiology and Exobiology," and characterized the Exobiology pro-
gram as "a key element of NASA's nascent Astrobiology Initiative."^"

At the same time, ever mindful of funding issues, the tremendous public
interest was not lost on NASA officials. "We're not going to fmd the cure for
cancer by doing this," DeVincenzi remarked, "but the payback to the American
public and the worldwide public is a continuing new perspective on ourselves,
on our role, how our environment shapes us and we shape the environment. The
impact is more of a philosophical impact than a practical impact. And it will
affect our education, it will affect what stimulated new science and technology
developments, and that's what basic research is all about." Key in involving the
outside world was Kathleen Council, who as Astrobiology's outreach manager
at Ames made sure that astrobiology received a hearing in Washington political
circles. This was done in a variety of ways, through the Internet, the Aerospace
States Association, with its many contacts on Capitol Hill, and well-placed brief-
ings. As with all NASA missions, the Astrobiology Institute carried out its own
Education and Public Outreach program, mandated at 1-2 percent of the total

Renaissance 213

mission funding. These activities cannot be underestimated in astrobiology's
meteoric rise. As the interest among students and the benefits to education be-
came increasingly apparent, the educational component of astrobiology was cor-
respondingly strengthened.

The Astrobiology Institute

The idea of an Astrobiology Institute was the product of constrained bud-
gets at NASA as well as Goldin's desire that NASA should leverage its con-
tacts with the academic community for scientific research and do less in-house
research and more collaborative efforts with academia. JPL, a NASA center with
no civil servants, run by CalTech, was an example. NASA already had two other
institutes, the Goddard Space Institute in New York and an institute that Marshall
Spaceflight Center had formed with the University of Huntsville in Alabama.
In an extreme form of the proposal for Ames civil servants would have been
fired and transferred to an astrobiology institute, but this idea did not reach leg-
islative action in Congress. Nevertheless for a year a team consisting of mem-
bers from NASA headquarters and its centers studied the idea of an institute in
some form, visiting institutes such as the National Center for Atmospheric Re-
search (NCAR) as benchmarks. In the end emerged the Biomedical Institute at
Johnson Space Center, the Microgravity Institute at Lewis Center in Cleveland,
and the Astrobiology Institute at Ames.^'

The initial development of the Astrobiology Institute concept fell mainly
to Scott Hubbard, the deputy director of space at Ames, working with Michael
Meyer at headquarters and Hubbard's colleagues David Morrison and Lynn
Harper, among others at Ames. Gerald Soffen was also essential as an advocate
at NASA headquarters for the institute, convincing — some might say strong-arm-
ing— life and Earth sciences to contribute substantial funding. In April 1997
Ames personnel wrote a first draft of the concept for an institute, in which more
could be done with less. The draft was widely circulated to the scientific com-
munity, with comments and questions to be considered until 29 August. The Co-
operative Agreement Notice (CAN) soliciting proposals for members of the
NASA Astrobiology Institute was released in September 1997, for selection in
early 1998. Among the innovative features of the institute was its "virtual" na-
ture: its members were to be geographically dispersed and not individuals but
organizations, ranging from industry, universities, and nonprofit groups to NASA
centers and other government agencies. Organizations were encouraged to form
cooperative partnerships. The virtual institute members would be tied together
by the "Next Generation Internet" (NGI); by personnel exchanges; by series of
workshops, seminars, and courses; and by sharing common research interests.
The resulting research would complement work carried out by individual prin-
cipal investigators in NASA's Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology grant pro-
grams.^^ The CAN also clarified the relation of astrobiology to the Origins
program, emphasizing that it "has substantial overlap with the Origins program.

214 The Living Universe

and extends beyond it to encompass questions dealing with the adaptability of
terrestrial biology to nonterrestrial environments and the development and evo-
lution of ecologies and their interaction with their changing environments, es-
pecially when those changes are rapid."

In addition to multidisciplinary research, the institute was charged with
developing new program directions and mission and technology requirements,
developing a new generation of astrobiologists, and "capitalizing on the great
public appeal of Astrobiology by building an education and outreach program
to share the excitement of discovery with the people who pay for it." Its goal of
using the Next Generation Internet as a tool for conducting research and foster-
ing scientific exchange dovetailed nicely with Ames's designation as NASA's
Center of Excellence in Information Technology, charged as the NASA lead in
a multiagency effort to develop the NGI.

On 19 May 1998 NASA headquarters announced the selection of eleven
academic and research institutions as the first members of the Astrobiology In-
stitute and billed it as "launching a major component of NASA's Origins Pro-
gram." The competition had been intense; fifty-three "uniformly first-class
proposals" had been submitted. The eleven winners, expanded to fifteen in
2001 (table 9.1), included five universities, three research institudons, and three
NASA centers, including Ames, Johnson Space Center, and JPL. The inclusion
of three NASA centers made sense: JPL was the lead center for the Origins pro-
gram, Johnson was the center for the team that had announced the Mars rock,
and Ames had its long history of exobiological research and was astrobiology's
parent. In a memo sent to all staff the same day, Ames director Harry McDonald
congratulated the team submitting Ames's proposal, remarking that it had been
"earned by years of making significant contributions to the subject matter. . . .
We are very proud of our astrobiologists!" The original eleven institutions di-
vided some four million dollars for fiscal 1998, looked forward to nine million
in 1999, and hoped eventually to grow to one hundred million per year.^^

The establishment of the new institute generated an enormous amount of
excitement, especially among the winners. Harvard paleontologist Andrew Knoll
saw it as "providing for the first time a comfortable intellectual home for these
kinds of investigations." But establishing a new institute of such scope again
raised funding issues similar to those three years before, when astrobiology was
first broached. The search for sustained funding caused considerable tensions
within the NASA bureaucracy, as some players refused to participate by con-
tributing money from their already established programs. Among other admin-
istrative issues was the question of choosing a director. The top choice to head
the institute, departing NASA associate administrator for space science Wes
Huntress, declined, and, for the better part of a year, first Gerald Soffen and
then Scott Hubbard served as the interim directors of the Astrobiology Institute.^'*

Only in May 1999 did Goldin announce that Nobelist Baruch S. Blumberg
would take over in September as head of the Astrobiology Institute, headquar-
tered at Ames (fig. 9.1).^^ In appointing Blumberg at age seventy-three, Goldin

Renaissance 215

Table 9. 1 NASA Astrobiology Institute Members and International Partners
Institution Research Focus

Eleven institutions announced, 19 May 1998"

Arizona State University, Tempe Organic synthesis

Carnegie Institution of Washington Life in hydrothermal systems

Harvard University, Cambridge Geochemistry and paleontology

Pennsylvania State University Coevolution of Earth's biota

Scripps Research Institute Self-replicating systems

University of California, Los Angeles Paleomicrobiology; early ecosystems

University of Colorado, Boulder Origin/habitability of planets; RNA

catalysis; philosophical aspects

Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole Microbial diversity; origins of proteins

Ames Research Center, Mountain View Planet formation; Earth-biosphere

interaction

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Biosignatures of life

Johnson Space Center, Houston, Tex. Biomarkers in rocks

Four additional institutions announced, 19 March 2001

Michigan State University, East Lansing Earth analogs to life on Mars and Europa
University of Rhode Island, Kingston Extremophiles in deep biosphere

University of Washington, Seattle Earliest life on Earth; extrasolar planetary

life
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Recognizing biospheres of extrasolar

planets

International partners

Centro de Astrobiologia, Torrejon de Ardoz, Spain
United Kingdom Astrobiology Forum and Network, Cambridge, UK
Australian Centre for Astrobiology, Sydney, Australia
Grupement des Recherches en Exobiology, Paris

"Agreements were for a period of five years. In 2003 twelve new teams were chosen, some at the
same institutions but with different topics. Six institutions added at this time were Indiana Univer-
sity, the SETI Institute, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, University of Arizona (Tucson), Uni-
versity of California (Berkeley), and University of Hawaii (Manoa). At that time Arizona State,
Harvard, Scripps Research Institute, the first Jet Propulsion Lab team, and Johnson Space Center
ended their tenure as members. By this time the European Exo/Astrobiology Network Association
had also been added as an international partner

secured a man with a sterling reputation in science but no background in exobi-
ology. Blumberg was a biochemist who had received the 1976 Nobel Prize in
Physiology and Medicine for his discovery of the hepatitis B virus and the
development of a vaccine. But he had made contributions to a broad array of
problems in human biology, biochemistry, and genomics. And genomics was
envisioned as one of the core fields for astrobiology. It was Blumberg who had
chaired the Ames workshop "Genomics on the International Space Station" five
months before he was named to head the institute.^^ His participation in this

216 The Living Universe

Figure 9.1. Daniel Goldin, Harry McDonald, and Baruch Blumberg at the 18 May 1999
press conference at which Goldin announced Blumberg's appointment as head of the
Astrobiology Institute. McDonald was the director of NASA Ames, where the institute
was headquartered. (Courtesy NASA Ames Research Center.)

workshop showed real insight into astrobiology and a genuine love of multi-
disciplinary research. He was excited by space flight and believed in the im-
portance of the new astrobiology program. Blumberg was also a field biologist
who understood space missions intuitively because he had made scientific dis-
coveries in deep Africa using only the equipment he could carry on his back.
He related immediately to the Antarctic exobiology researchers. He also was a
believer in the value of research in extreme environments, including the ex-
tremely low gravity environment of space. There is no doubt that the appoint-
ment of such a luminary, who also assembled a luminous board of advisors, was
an important landmark for astrobiology.

Blumberg's appointment also provided an opportunity for Goldin to give
astrobiology a rhetorical, if not a monetary, boost. Astrobiology, NASA's admini-
strator remarked in ceremonies at Ames, was "the cornerstone to NASA's mission
in the new millennium." Comparing the understanding of the origin and evolu-
tion of life to the generational effort of cathedral building a thousand years earlier
and hoping to bring a new level of knowledge to biology as had been done in
physics over the previous fifty years, Goldin remarked that "quite possibly the
rewards from this pursuit of Astrobiology may eclipse the societal and economic
benefits of all prior NASA activity." One of the reasons for locating the institute
at Ames was to enable the synergy between information technology and astro-
biology, not only at Ames but with the surrounding Silicon Valley as well. As-

Renaissance 217

trobiology, Goldin noted, "is a revolution that will require its own revolution . . .
in communications, networking, information technology, computing and scien-
tific thinking." Noting the collaboration of government, industry, and academia
within the Astrobiology Institute, Goldin saw their goal as "trying to discover
if there is a thread of life beyond Earth. It is a powerful concept. And it is a
concept whose time has come." Blumberg agreed, foreseeing a "flowering of
biology" in the next century. Not to be left out, chemists also showed interest
in joining the institute.^^

Thus, exactly four years after Ames was given the lead for astrobiology
in May 1995, and one year after the institute's first eleven members were cho-
sen in May 1998, the Astrobiology Institute was well on its way to becoming
an important institutional home for the new field of astrobiology. Meanwhile,
one other element had been put in place, a more detailed plan for astrobiology's
future. By summer 1998 astrobiology management at Ames, feeling the program
was ready to gel, convened an all-important roadmap meeting.

The Roadmap

Three years of hope, hype, and hard work culminated on 20-22 July 1998,
when 150 scientists met at Ames to draft a roadmap for astrobiology for the
next twenty years, with emphasis on the first five. The invitation letter from
David Morrison (cochair of the meeting with Michael Meyer) billed the work-
shop as "a critical planning activity to delineate NASA's role in the new field
of Astrobiology, spanning elements of space, life and earth science." The task
was to proceed from astrobiology's basic questions to "a more detailed plan of
how and when we will answer these questions." Starting with the fundamental
questions developed in the first astrobiology workshop of September 1996 and
subsequently refined in the Astrobiology Institute CAN, the workshop was to
articulate "a visionary set of science goals to be achieved in the coming decades
in this new field, as well as the intermediate science objectives that must be
met to realize these goals." Furthermore, it was to derive requirements for labora-
tory and theoretical research, for missions, and for the technologies to accomplish
these goals. This, in turn, would lead to a decision about where astrobiology's
goals would fit in with, and where necessary modify, existing programs such as
the Mars program, the Discovery program, and the International Space Station.^^

The concept of a "roadmap" can be traced back only to 1995 at NASA,
when three teams were assembled to put together the Exploration of Neighbor-
ing Planetary Systems (ExNPS) roadmap, an effort coordinated by JPL and pub-
lished in 1996 (described in chap. 7). The idea of a roadmap was not to set down
detailed milestones or even to map goals onto missions but to provide guidance
for research and technology development over the long term. Within NASA vet-
erans knew that astrobiology could not be a purely intellectual endeavor; it had
to be tied to what NASA did best: space missions. Exactly how astrobiology
would be integrated into NASA's space science. Earth science, and human space

218 The Living Universe

exploration enterprises would take years to work out, and in doing so astro-
biology's goals had to be kept constantly in mind.

The roadmap workshop began with opening remarks from Ames director
Henry McDonald, administrator Goldin (by videophone, since he was tied up
with budget issues in Washington), Michael Meyer, David Morrison, and Scott
Hubbard, who was then the interim manager for the Astrobiology Institute. After
brief tutorials on various aspects of astrobiology, breakout sessions were held
centering on astrobiology's driving questions and how they might be answered
by existing or future NASA missions.

The final Astrobiology Roadmap, released on 6 January 1999, identified
four principles, ten goals, and seventeen objectives for astrobiology. The oper-
ating principles were as follows:

1 . Astrobiology is multidisciplinary, and achieving our goals will require the
cooperation of different scientific disciplines and programs.

2. Astrobiology encourages planetary stewardship, through an emphasis on
protection against biological contamination and recognition of the ethical
issues surrounding the export of terrestrial life beyond Earth.

3. Astrobiology recognizes a broad societal interest in our subject, especially
in areas such as the search for extraterrestrial life and the potential to en-
gineer new life forms adapted to live on other worlds.

4. In view of the intrinsic excitement and wide public interest in our sub-
ject, astrobiology includes a strong element of education and public out-
reach.

Astrobiology's goals as perceived at this meeting were more specific (table
9.2). All, of course, were related to the three fundamental questions that had
been enunciated early in the development of the concept of astrobiology: (1)
How does life begin and evolve? (2) Does life exist elsewhere in the universe?
(3) What is life's future on Earth and beyond? The roadmap further spelled out
how each of the goals might be met through even more specific objectives (see
app. D) and implementation examples.^'

One of the unexpected events of the meeting was the development of a
significant splinter discussion by a small but diverse group of participants: "How
will astrobiology affect and interact with human societies and cultures?" Par-
ticipants in this discussion group, inspired by Astrobiology's third operating prin-
ciple, proposed that a multidisciplinary approach be used to understand the
consequences of the search for life on Earth and beyond, the explanation of life
beyond Earth, and the discovery of life beyond Earth. This question became the
object of controversy, with some claiming that social science had no place in
NASA, especially if it were going to divert funding. A few of the scientists, in-
cluding planetary scientist Bruce Jakosky from the University of Colorado, were
sympathetic; they argued that to a large extent philosophical questions were the
intellectual drivers behind astrobiology and that it was incumbent on the scien-
tific community to work through the issues of what the results of astrobiology

Renaissance 219
Table 9.2 Astrobiology Goals

1 . Understand how life arose on Earth

2. Determine the general principles governing the organization of matter into
systems

3. Explore how life evolves on the molecular, organism, and ecosystem level

4. Determine how the terrestrial biosphere has coevolved with the Earth

5. Establish limits for life in environments that provide analogues for con-
ditions on other worlds

6. Determine what makes a planet habitable and how common these worlds
are in the universe

7. Determine how to recognize the signature of life on other worlds

8. Determine whether there is (or once was) life elsewhere in our solar sys-
tem, particularly on Mars and Europa

9. Determine how ecosystems respond to environmental change on time
scales relevant to human life on Earth

1 0. Understand the response of terrestrial life to conditions in space or on other
planets

Source: From Astrobiology Roadmap, released 6 January 1999.

meant to society. In the end the three goals the group proposed were not in-
cluded in the final report. Nevertheless, astrobiology's third operating principle,
recognizing "a broad societal interest in our subject," did sanction such discus-
sions, and in 1 999 Ames sponsored a workshop on cultural aspects of astrobi-
ology. There was precedent for this activity — SETI pioneers beginning with
Philip Morrison had discussed societal implications; John Billingham champi-
oned such discussion by organizing a series of workshops in 1991-1992, and
exobiology meetings occasionally entertained, and even featured, the subject.
The roadmap workshop itself encouraged such discussion when, as if the science
were not mind-expanding enough, the organizers brought in futurist Alvin Toffler
to engage in a dialogue about "The Fourth Wave and Astrobiology." Toffler be-
came one of the participants in the cultural aspects discussion group, along with
science fiction writer Ben Bova.

In the wake of the roadmap Ames redoubled its advocacy for the program
for which it was now the lead. In October 1999 Kathleen Connell organized
(via the Aerospace States Association) an astrobiology symposium with a dif-
ference: this one was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, featured several
members of Congress as speakers in addition to Blumberg and other astrobiol-
ogy luminaries, and had a largely political audience. In his remarks Blumberg
struck a "Lewis and Clark" theme, emphasizing that astrobiology was about explora-
tion, a defining feature of American culture. There were other indications of the
up-and-coming status of astrobiology. Soffen was instrumental in establishing

220 The Living Universe

an "Astrobiology Academy" at Ames, an internship for a dozen students during
the summer. Postdoctoral awards, sponsored by NASA and administered by the
National Research Council, were given for the Astrobiology Institute beginning
in 2000. The University of Washington developed the first graduate program in
astrobiology, and several astrobiology textbooks were being written. And, with
increasing interest and research overseas, astrobiology was becoming interna-
tionalized, with some institutions becoming associated with the Astrobiology
Institute (see table 9.1).

As the end of the millennium approached, many of the elements were in
place for a reinvigorated discipline of astrobiology: a definition, a roadmap, a
virtual institute, enthusiasm, and minimal funding. How these elements, and the
lofty principles, goals, and objectives of astrobiology translated into real science,
and whether they would usher in Soffen's great age of discovery, remained for
the future to determine. In the epilogue we can offer only a glimpse of the shape
of things to come but no hint at all of the discipline's ultimate answer to the
question of the past, present, and future of life in the universe.

Epilogue

(lAstrobiology Science

Into the Great Age of Discovery?

^n an emerging scientific discipline the po-
litical skills needed for fund raising, convening workshops, and providing the
myriad details of administration are necessary precursors, not ends in themselves.
The ultimate goal of all these activities is to foster world-class science. The sci-
entific questions of astrobiology, long-standing mysteries with potentially great
societal impact, were the primary motivator for expanding the horizons of exo-
biology. The Astrobiology Institute, although virtual in concept, was the col-
laborative engine that would drive the new discipline and, it was hoped, spark
it onward toward the development of innovative techniques and into what Gerald
Soffen optimistically called the "Great Age of Discovery." There were no guar-
anteed outcomes, either for discovering life beyond Earth or for finding the op-
timal administrative and technical methods to reach that goal. Although there
would be many advances made along the way, in the end the emergent disci-
pline of astrobiology as a means to reach the ultimate discovery itself remained
a great experiment.

In this respect, although workshops, funding, and administrative challenges
were nothing new, the contrast between exobiology as conceived in the 1960s
and astrobiology at the turn of the century was quite striking. To be sure, exo-
biology and astrobiology shared the core concerns of origins of life research
and the search for life beyond Earth. But astrobiology placed life in the context
of its planetary history, encompassing the search for planetary systems, the study
of biosignatures, and the past, present, and future of life. Astrobiology science
added new techniques and concepts to exobiology's repertoire, raised multi-
disciplinary work to a new level, and was motivated by new and tantalizing evi-
dence for life beyond Earth. In addition to comparing astrobiology to the Lewis
and Clark exploration, Astrobiology Institute director Baruch Blumberg was fond
of pointing out that astrobiology was different from most science in that, in-
stead of becoming more and more specialized, it was increasingly generalized,
making use of many specialties to tackle a very broad set of questions.

221

222 The Living Universe

Exactly how astrobiology would develop was anyone's guess when it was
invented, the roadmap notwithstanding. In its early stages perhaps the best gauge
was the biennial astrobiology science conference, the first of which was held at
Ames in April 2000. In the inaugural meeting, consisting of three days of oral
and poster presentations, more than 350 participants demonstrated, as Ames di-
rector Henry McDonald remarked, that "astrobiology is already a real and
exciting science."' For those worried about the scope of astrobiology David
Morrison offered an operational and practical definition: "Astrobiology will be
defined in time by what astrobiologists do." Baruch Blumberg agreed that astro-
biology would incorporate new objectives as new interests and opportunities
developed and emphasized that astrobiology was a generational endeavor, analo-
gous to cathedral building, not only in terms of such activities as a mission to
Europa but also in incrementally increasing knowledge of astrobiology's major
questions. Failure to discover extraterrestrial life, he felt, would be a step back
from the Copemican revolution. Conference organizer Lynn Rothschild exulted
that astrobiology "liberates us from disciplinary boundaries." And Exobiology
Discipline scientist Michael Meyer added what everyone wanted to hear — that
the budget for astrobiology at headquarters was on an upward curve.

Notwithstanding Morrison's open-ended definition of astrobiology, lim-
its were evident in this first meeting. No papers were presented on the Big Bang
and the origin of the universe, none on galaxy formation and dynamics, not even
any on the large-scale structure of our own galaxy. Rather, the discussion be-
gan (logically though purposely not in order of presentation) with solar system
dynamics and planetary detection, proceeded to cosmic chemistry and the origin
of life, continued through the evolution of the genome, metabolism, and micro-
bial communities, and ended with the evolution of advanced "metazoan" life.
In this discussion Mars played a large role, including its geology, climatology,
and oxidants; the latest research on the Mars meteorite; and planned Mars mis-
sions. The single greatest interest was shown in laboratory and theoretical stud-
ies of prebiological chemistry, perhaps still an artifact of funding in the old
exobiology program. But interest in new research on biomarkers and on life in
extreme environments was also very strong. Aside from a paper given by Bruce
Jakosky (the chair of the Scientific Organizing Committee), the roadmap's ren-
egade question on the cultural impact of astrobiology was entirely absent, per-
haps equal parts a reflection of the difficulty of getting social scientists involved
and the lack of encouragement from natural scientists. And SETI was notably
lacking, except for a handful of poster papers, one of which was dedicated to
education. With respect to SETI, the meeting starkly demonstrated how gov-
ernment funding, or lack thereof, could shape an entire field. Altogether, how-
ever, some thirty categories of the emerging science were represented aside from
SETI (app. C). And this was just the first astrobiology science meeting.

The second astrobiology science conference, held on 7-11 April 2002 at
Ames, revealed an even more thriving discipline. The venue was the soaring
1930s "Hangar 1" dirigible building, a necessity in order to accommodate the

Epilogue 223

seven hundred participants but also a symbol of astrobiology's lofty aspirations.
(One would not want to carry the metaphor too far; the hangar became obsolete
in the 1930s, when dirigibles began crashing, a reminder that astrobiology was
always in danger of losing funding.) The unofficial theme, enunciated by Michael
Meyer as the meeting opened, was that "astrobiology has arrived." Baruch Blum-
berg had sounded the same theme in a special issue of Ad Astra, the magazine
of the National Space Society, circulated at the meeting. Assessing "Astrobiol-
ogy at T H- 5 Years," Blumberg wrote: "In five short years, Astrobiology has
been transformed from a buzz word one had to explain into an overarching
research and exploration paradigm that people from diverse backgrounds can
intuitively and easily grasp. Its influence can clearly be seen in a variety of Earth-
based and space-based research projects." He concluded: "Astrobiology has ar-
rived. And we've only just started."^

Blumberg's statement was true in a variety of ways. The Astrobiology In-
stitute budget had by now increased to some forty million dollars, 90 percent
of it from Space Science at headquarters and the remainder from Earth and Life
Science. Six "focus groups" had sprung up to coordinate and enhance research
efforts: evolutionary genomics, astromaterials, mission to early Earth, mixed
microbial ecogenomics. Mars, and Europa. In another sign of an emergent dis-
cipline, in addition to the relatively venerable Origins of Life and Evolution of
the Biosphere, two journals now vied for prominence at the meeting: the Inter-
national Journal of Astrobiology, published by Cambridge University Press, and
the American journal Astrobiology. By the second meeting in 2002 the Astrobi-
ology Institute had grown to fifteen members and four intemational associate
or affiliate members (see table 9.1). Most important of all, the scientific basis
for astrobiology was growing more solid, as evident in the number and quality
of the papers and in new techniques. Although the categories at the second as-
trobiology science conference had been conflated from thirty-one to thirteen
more general topics, the scope was still the same. In part (and only in part, given
that intemational partners received no NASA funding, and not all American re-
searchers in the field did either) the astrobiology science meetings represent a
command performance, a chance for astrobiology researchers to show NASA
funders what they are getting for their money. More than that, they were an im-
portant means of communication and socialization, especially critical for such
a multidisciplinary endeavor. Along with published research the meetings demon-
strate how astrobiology was developing, as reflected in the research undertaken
at the member organizations of the Astrobiology Institute and in universities and
laboratories around the world. Finally, these gatherings, taken together with pub-
lished research, give an early sense of how, and in what relative proportions,
astrobiology is addressing its three guiding questions: how does life begin and
evolve? Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? And what is life's future on
Earth and beyond?

As we have repeatedly stressed, and as astrobiologists themselves explic-
itiy acknowledge as part of their motivation, these are fundamental questions

224 The Living Universe

that humanity has asked in increasingly subtle and refined forms over millen-
nia. It is now fair to inquire, as critics often do, whether any progress has been
made in addressing these questions, especially since NASA's involvement be-
gan, over four decades ago, with its infusion of government funding.

It must be said that forty years of research on the origin and evolution of
life has resulted in great advances in understanding while leaving the ultimate
questions unresolved.^ The basic problem of whether organics originated on
Earth, from space, or some combination of the two, is still very much open.
Laboratory and theoretical studies of prebiotic chemistry — the bread and butter
of the exobiology program from the beginning — remain a strong research pro-
gram in astrobiology. Work on laboratory models for replicating systems, me-
tabolism in primitive living systems, and microbial ecology are advancing in
ways unforeseen. Of all the new techniques, especially genomics — use of the
gene database for clues to evolution — has opened entirely new vistas of research.
Still, consensus on ultimate origins remains elusive, even as the questions were
refined.

Under these circumstances there was considerable scope and hope for a
great age of discovery. The specific scientific tasks needed to answer the ques-
tions of origins were embedded in astrobiology's objectives as stated in the origi-
nal roadmap (app. D). Work on these tasks, spread not only among the members
of the Astrobiology Institute but also in laboratories around the world, is ad-
vancing unevenly and sometimes excruciatingly slowly. But taken together they
represent a unified attack on one of the great problems of science, the first com-
ponent of astrobiology's ambitious agenda.

Questions of the origin and evolution of life were addressed using sev-
eral broad complementary methods: laboratory studies, real-life Earth history,
and astronomical observations, often used in combination. All were well repre-
sented at the Astrobiology science conferences. The origin of complex organics
is a case in point. At both conferences Louis AUamandola and his team at NASA
Ames reported on their work combining laboratory simulations with infrared
studies of interstellar molecules and ices to show how complex organics such
as poylcyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were formed through the interac-
tion of ultraviolet light and cosmic rays."* Such a "cold start" for complex or-
ganics in space was a stark contrast to the hot dilute soup assumed by early
exobiologists. And both contrasted in technique and concept with the "hydro-
thermal vent" scenario for the origin of life, based on hot springs and undersea
vents, the latter completely unknown when exobiology began its career. Carl
Woese's work on phylogenetic relationships from gene sequencing fingered
"Archaea" as in some ways the most primitive and perhaps eariiest organisms,
giving rise to the possibility of a "hot start" for life in the energy-rich environ-
ment of water and minerals recycling at mid-ocean ridges where seafloor spread-
ing was taking place. Thus, one could choose whether the rudiments of life began
in outer space, on or below the Earth's surface, or deep undersea in the realm
of the extremophiles.

Epilogue 225

Because the evidence of "what actually happened" at the origin of life was
forever lost, laboratory studies were especially crucial for the early stages of
biogenesis. One major problem remained the emergence of self-replicating mol-
ecules, a crucial step on the way from inanimate chemical reactions to the chem-
istry of living systems. Here the "RNA world" model was pitted against the more
traditional protein-based model. Several laboratories, including those at the Uni-
versity of Colorado and the Scripps Research Institute, in collaboration with the
University of Florida and the University of California-Riverside, worked to test
these models. Beyond self-replication the laboratory approach also shed light
on a variety of other steps in biogenesis. At the University of California-Santa
Cruz, for example, David Deamer has studied for decades the self-assembly of
membranes from "amphiphilic" components that he showed in 1989 to be present
in carbonaceous meteorites such as Murchison, an essential step in explaining
the membrane-bounded cell perhaps essential for the origin of life. By 2001 Jason
Dworkin, working with Deamer and Allamandola, among others, synthesized
self-assembling amphiphihc molecules in simulated interstellar/precometary ices.
The origin of prokaryotes in Earth's early biosphere, eukaryote origins, and evo-
lution of cellular complexity all were part of the astrobiology effort at the ven-
erable Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, among others. Laboratory
studies of models of simple cellular systems were under way.

Beyond the laboratory researchers employed a variety of techniques to
study Earth's earliest life. Led by J. William Schopf, part of UCLA's astrobiol-
ogy effort concentrated on the geobiology and geochemistry of the oldest records
of life on Earth, some 3.46 billion years old. (As an indication of the difficulty
of such work, at the 2002 astrobiology science meeting Martin Brasier from
Oxford University and his team questioned the validity of the morphological
evidence on which Schopf's claim was based.) At Penn State a broad array of
researchers focused on the coevolution of life and the environment 4.5 billion
to 500 million years ago, especially the chemistry of the atmosphere. As an ex-
ample of this work, James Kasting, a pioneer in the field of coevolution of life
and the environment, reported at the 2002 meeting on the relationship of
cyanobacteria to the rise of atmospheric oxygen around 2.3 billion years into
Earth's history. Another research area centered around the new field of "bio-
geochemistry," in particular the study of modem cyanobacterial mats as ana-
logues to ancient mats that left stromatolitic fossils on primitive Earth. Such
microbial mats have a 3.46 billion-year fossil record and represent the oldest
known ecosystems. David Demarais, one of the pioneers in this area, was also
one of the founders of astrobiology at Ames and constantly emphasized the multi-
faceted relevance of biogeochemistry to astrobiology, including its role in gen-
erating biosignatures in Earth's atmosphere. At Harvard a broad range of studies
were under way, concentrating on three transition periods in Earth history be-
lieved to be critical to the evolution of life: the Archean-Proterozoic period 2.5
to 2 billion years ago, when bacteria with aerobic metabolism and eukaryotes
with mitochondria evolved; the Proterozoic-Cambrian period 800 to 509 million

226 The Living Universe

years ago, when large multicellular life emerged; and the Permian-Triassic pe-
riod 251 million years ago, when a major mass extinction occurred. In search
of life's extremes, astrobiology's researchers trekked to the Antarctic dry val-
leys, the Chilean Atacama desert, the Siberian permafrost, and surface hot
springs; dived thousands of feet under the ocean's surface to hydrothermal vents
at the mid-ocean ridges; and explored exotic cave ecosystems.

Whether in the lab or during empirical investigations, the use of 16s ri-
bosomal RNA shed light on the relationship of the earliest organisms in ways
undreamed of a few decades earlier. Woese's use of this method to discover the
tripartite structure of the living world as composed of bacteria, archaea, and
eukarya was now used to define the many branches of the universal tree of life.
One such study at the 2002 astrobiology science conference demonstrated the
genetic diversity and dynamics of microbial populations of cyanobacteria asso-
ciated with stromatolites, believed to be analogues of early life on Earth. Using
similar phylogenetic studies, at the same meeting University of Colorado re-
searchers reported on endolithic microbial communities as a function of the type
of rock (sandstone, limestone, and granite) in which the microbes are found. So
promising was the new technique that the Astrobiology Institute formed a focus
group on exactly this field of "evolutionary genomics" — the analysis of genomes
with the goal of understanding how life originated and evolved on Earth. An
understanding of how life on Earth changed with the Earth's environment might
provide a basis for developing biomarkers on other habitable planets. This
"evogenomic" group was complemented by the "ecogenomics" group, which
studied the relationships among gene expression, microbial diversity, and bio-
geochemical processes. In particular, gene expression in microbial mat organ-
isms was compared in various environments. Ames and the Marine Biological
Laboratory led this eifort, which was inconceivable at the beginning of the space
age.

Such research represents only the tip of the iceberg of research in
astrobiology's "origins" question. Such research was by no means confined to
official members of the Astrobiology Institute. But the benefit of the institute
was that it fostered interdisciplinary collaboration both within and among insti-
tutions, perhaps with mixed success because that goal was so challenging. Of-
ten members of a single institution studied not only many aspects of the origin
of life but also other parts of the cosmic evolution puzzle as well. Astronomers
and biologists were not accustomed to talking to one another, even at the same
institution, a problem compounded between institutions. The laudable goal of
the Astrobiology Institute was to create synergy not only from a unified research
program and new techniques but also from increased interactions among re-
searchers.

The theme kept constantly in mind in origins research was that what had
happened on Earth might have happened on other planets, that the past could
illuminate the present, shedding light on life on other worlds. The Earth was a
great petri dish, and so too were other planets. Astrobiology's second great ques-

Epilogue 227

tion was not only whether Hfe could exist in the universe but whether it actu-
ally does exist.

The bottom line in the quest for life on other worlds — the oldest compo-
nent of astrobiology — was that it had still not been found, claims for Martian
microfossils notwithstanding. At the same time the question had been entirely
transformed compared to exobiology forty years before. To be sure, there was
the usual theme of life on Mars, now immeasurably enhanced by better space-
craft data of the planet. There was also the theoretical and empirical work on
habitable planets, now transformed from embryonic planetary formation theo-
ries and Peter van de Kamp's single (and spurious) claim for a planet around
Barnard's star to much more robust theories of planet formation and the dis-
covery of almost one hundred extrasolar planets. But there were entirely new
areas almost unheard of at the beginning of the space age: work on life in ex-
treme environments, possible organic molecules and even habitats for life in the
outer solar system (notably Europa), and biomarkers for detecting life on extra-
solar planets. In addition, the idea of panspermia, the spread of life from planet
to planet, was given great impetus by the controversy over the Mars rock.

The renewed search for life habitats in the solar system was a remarkable
reversal of fortune in the wake of the disappointing Viking results. The infa-
mous Mars rock and its still-disputed fossils certainly played an important role
in this revival. But new data from missions to Mars, the first since Viking, played
a crucial role as well. Although it carried no life detection experiments. Mars
Pathfinder reinvigorated interest in Mars in 1997, with its daredevil bouncing
landing. Sojourner rover, and raft of science data ranging from Martian geochem-
istry to meteorology. In the summer of 2001 Mars Global Surveyor revealed
numerous gullies on Martian cUffs and crater walls and evidence of geologi-
cally recent liquid water (fig. Epi.l). Within months of beginning its mission in
February 2002, Mars Odyssey gave strong evidence that large quantities of wa-
ter were present within three feet of the surface of Mars at latitudes from the
south pole to 60 degrees south. In 2004 the European Mars Express Orbiter re-
turned data indicating the presence of methane in the Martian atmosphere, pos-
sibly of biogenic origin. Meanwhile Opportunity, one of the American Mars
Express Rovers (MERs), examined an outcrop of salt-laden sediment and found
thin intersecting layers interpreted as sand ripples, perhaps shaped by flowing
water in a huge shallow sea.

Even more surprising than Mars was the astrobiological potential of the
Jovian satellite Europa. The Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1979 had originally dis-
covered the fractured nature of Europa's surface. In 1996, the same month that
the Mars rock fossils were claimed, the Galileo spacecraft gave added impetus
to the theory that these fractures could be cracks in an ice-covered planet. More-
over, the Galileo spacecraft supported the claim that Europa might harbor a liquid
ocean below the ice (fig. Epi.2). And where there was water, there could be life.
Not even Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction had dreamed of this scenario when
NASA's exobiology program began in the early 1960s, though Clarke did broach

228 The Living Universe

Epilogue Figure I . Gullies on Mars, believed to be less than a million years old, indicate
that water may still exist just under the surface of the planet. (Mars Global Surveyor
image courtesy NASA / JPL / Mahn Space Systems.)

it in his novel 2070. The controversy raged over how thick the ice was, whether
life could originate in an ocean, and how to reach it. The National Research
Council of the National Academy of Sciences drew up a science strategy for
exploring Europa and for preventing its contamination, and NASA even con-
templated a Europa mission. The Astrobiology Institute Europa focus group was
only one of many that addressed these questions. With all the excitement and
an increasing number of published papers, Europa had a small but steady pres-
ence at the astrobiology science meetings.' And beyond the moons of Jupiter
loomed Saturn and its enigmatic moon Titan, whose secrets (including possible
complex organic molecules) might be revealed in 2004 when the Huygens probe
of the Cassini spacecraft entered its atmosphere.

Beyond the solar system an important focus of the astrobiology science

Epilogue 229

Epilogue Figure 2. The fractured surface of Jupiter's moon Europa indicates that water
may exist below the ice. (Courtesy NASA/JPL.)

meetings and members of the Astrobiology Institute was the search for extrasolar
planets, now rapidly advancing using a variety of techniques. Although NASA
had been slow to support the ground-based observations that had netted about
one hundred gas giant planets by the turn of the millennium, in 2002 it plunged
fully into the planet search when it funded the Kepler mission, a method of
searching for "transiting" planets by measuring the diminution of light when
the planet passed in front of its parent star. Bill Borucki, an astronomer at Ames,
had been the longtime champion of this method; he remained its principal in-
vestigator but now headed a team that would be responsible for launching the
spacecraft in 2007 and analyzing the data thereafter. Meanwhile, along with the
wider astronomical community, members of the Astrobiology Institute tackled
other aspects of what some had dubbed the new "planetary systems science."
At UCLA, the University of Colorado, and the Carnegie Institute of Washington,
among other institutions, researchers studied the formation of stars and planets

230 The Living Universe

and planetary habitability. And, whereas a decade earlier no planets had been
known at all, at JPL work was already being undertaken on the longer-term prob-
lem of recognizing the biospheres of extrasolar planets. By June 2002, when
NASA and the Carnegie Institution sponsored a meeting in Washington, D.C.,
on "Scientific Frontiers in Research on Extrasolar Planets," it drew some 250
researchers on this subject alone, many of them just entering a field they well
recognized as ripe for innovation and discovery.

In addition to missions to search for planets and life, new techniques played
a crucial role in reinvigorating the exploration for life in possible solar system
habitats— just as they did in the related field of origin of life studies. Extremo-
philes research at Ames and elsewhere probed the limits of life as it might exist
on other planets. The Carnegie Institute of Washington and Arizona State Uni-
versity undertook laboratory investigations of organic chemical systems as a
means of understanding hydrothermal systems. Such systems were potential ana-
logues to solar system bodies and potential sites for the origin of life on Earth.
The Johnson Space Center, center of the Mars rock controversy, studied the prob-
lem of biomarkers in astromaterials, including meteorites, interplanetary dust
particles, and future sample returns. A field once almost abandoned in the post-
Viking era was now more robust than ever.

The future of life on Earth and beyond — a question hardly enunciated in
early exobiology — remained the most undeveloped of astrobiology's three ques-
tions. Many scientists were not accustomed to dealing with the future, and it is
no surprise that this aspect of astrobiology was least represented at its science
meetings. Nevertheless, precisely because of the lack of attention, the potential
for new thinking and important discoveries was great. As the astrobiology
roadmap had stated, NASA had much to contribute to global problems such as
ecosystem response to rapid environmental change and Earth's future habitability
in terms of interactions between the biosphere and the chemistry and radiation
balance of the atmosphere. It was uniquely suited to understanding the human-
directed processes by which life could evolve beyond Earth. And it was charged
with initiating and refining planetary protection guidelines both for other plan-
ets that its spacecraft visited and for the Earth itself as sample return missions
were contemplated. Problems such as terraforming Mars were indeed problems
of the future but nonetheless important for that. NASA tackled such problems
with a greater or lesser degree of enthusiasm, which depended to a great extent
on individuals willing to lead the charge in these areas. Even in a fourteen
billion-dollar agency with thousands of employees, much still rested on indi-
vidual initiative.

Tied into this lack of enthusiasm for studies of the future of life was the
lack of attention to the societal implications of astrobiology. Only one of the
Astrobiology Institute's members, the University of Colorado, had "philosophical
aspects" as part of its official charter, due largely to the personal interest of plan-
etary scientist Bruce Jakosky. As the institute was gearing up, NASA did spon-
sor a workshop in 1999 on "Societal Implications of Astrobiology" which drew

Epilogue 231

a small but diverse group of scholars.* This was an outgrowth of the interest in
cultural implications expressed at the roadmap workshop. But progress in this
endeavor remained difficult; papers were an occasional feature of the triennial
bioastronomy meetings, and only one paper at the second astrobiology confer-
ence dealt with cultural evolution and its effect on the future of humanity.'' In
part for long-standing reasons of the "two cultures" divide, the melding of the
social sciences with the natural sciences proved even more difficult than the join-
ing of biological and physical sciences in exobiology's earlier history. There was
hope, however, for using NASA resources to study these problems. Such stud-
ies were certainly in line with the statement of NASA's new administrator, Sean
O'Keefe, that "in broad terms, our mandate is to pioneer the future, to push the
envelope, to do what has never been done before. An amazing charter indeed.
NASA is what Americans, and the people of the world, think of when the con-
versation turns to the future So in the end NASA is about creating the fu-
ture."^ Moreover, under the O'Keefe administration NASA's vision for the future
was "to improve life here. To extend life to there. To find life beyond." The
future of astrobiology seemed bright.

At the beginning of the new century astrobiology was thriving, with the
old concerns of exobiology at its core and the Origins program of cosmic evo-
lution as its ultimate context. Forty years after Harold Klein inaugurated Life
Sciences at NASA's Ames Research Center, it remained a center for astrobiol-
ogy in terms of numbers of researchers, laboratories, and sheer breadth. But now
the Astrobiology Institute, reinvigorated by new institutional members (see table
9.1) each funded at one million dollars per year and with refined objectives,
immensely multiplied and leveraged those factors. And beyond the institute a
worldwide effort was under way to answer one of science's oldest questions. In
four decades the effort had grown beyond the wildest expectations of exo-
biology's founders.

Would all these activities have been enough to silence critics such as evo-
lutionist George Gaylord Simpson, who in the 1960s had declared exobiology
a science without a subject? After forty years, was exobiology a scientific dis-
cipline or not? Implicitly or explicitly, astrobiologists took a practical opera-
tional stand. "Whenever anything comes up about exobiology you treat it as a
discipline, just like we're going to treat astrobiology as a discipline," Ames's
Donald DeVincenzi remarked in 1997. "Strictly speaking is it? I don't know. If

we say it is and we treat it that way, then it is, for these purposes These

names basically tell us how to manage things, we know how to manage disci-
plines. So if we're going to invent some brand new branch of science we're
going to call it a discipline. So there will be an astrobiology discipline, I can
guarantee you. And it will be run just like any other NASA discipline: geochem-
istry, geophysics, planetary atmospheres. But you're not going to find it in a
textbook probably, or in a department chairmanship."^ A few years later astro-
biology textbooks and university courses and programs in the subject, if not de-
partments, were a fact.

2i2 The Living Universe

Despite the excitement, astrobiology's future remained unclear at the
dawning of the twenty-first century. Like the dirigible hangar in which the sec-
ond astrobiology conference was held, it was possible that the new science could
become obsolete by failure — failure of funding, failure of imagination, or failure
to answer its core questions of the origins and ubiquity of life. Some astrobi-
ologists worried that the field was in danger of fragmenting and becoming too
narrow. '° It was hard to imagine, however, that it would fail through lack of
interest, whether public or scientific. Although the fundamental questions of
astrobiology remained unanswered, the desire to find answers was stronger than
ever.

Appendix A: Unpublished Sources

Oral History Interviews

Interviewee

Date

Interviewer

Peter Backus

16 September 1992

John Billingham

12 September 1990; 1 June 1992;
17 September 1992; 8 June 1993

David Black

30 January 2001

Martin Brasier

16 May 2002

Thomas Brock

15 February 1999

David Brocker

16 September 1992

Melvin Calvin

2 June 1992

Glenn Carle

13 May 1997

Sherwood Chang

21 November 1997

Erwin Chargaff

6 February 1999

Kathleen Connell

13 June 1997; 6 April 2000

Gary Coulter

27 July 1992; 30 September 1993

John Cronin

28 January 1997; 6 December 2000

William Day

17 August 1998

David Deamer

25 June; 11 July 1997

David DesMarais

12 May 1997

Donald DeVincenzi

8, 21, and 28 January; 4 and 1 1 February 1997

12 May 1997

Frank Drake

29-30 May 1992

Jack Farmer

19 November 1997

Sidney Fox

27 January; and 1 February 1993

Imre Friedmann

18 November 1997

Everett Gibson

16 and 23 January 2002

Sam Gulkis

26 June 1992

Lynn [Griffiths] Harper

13 May; and 21 November 1997

Lawrence Hochstein

15 May 1997

Norman Horowitz

15 January 1999

John Jungck

10 November 1999

Nicolai Kardashev

9 August 1988

John Kerridge

15 February 1997

233

234 Appendix A

Interviewee

Date

Interviewer

Bishun Khare

16 May 1997

H. P. Klein

15 September 1992; 14 May 1997

28 November 2000

Michael Klein

lOAugust 1988; 26 June 1992

Keith Kvenvolden

4 January 2002

Antonio Lazcano

27 February 1997

Joshua Lederberg

12 November 1992

15 January 1999

Gilbert Levin

21 February 2001

James Lovelock

23 March 2000

Lynn Margulis

23-24 June 1998

Gene McDonald

6 December 1999

Chris McKay

12 May 1997

David McKay

19 November 1997

Michael Meyer

4 February 1997; 27 December 2000

Stanley Miller

18 February 1997; 23 February 1999

Carleton Moore

9 January 2002

Harold Morowitz

20 March 2003

David Morrison

18 November 1997

Barnard M. Oliver

1 June 1992

Edward Olsen

8 January 1993

Juan Oro

28 January; and 5 February 1997

Bonnie Packer

2 September 2002

Michael Papagiannis

5 August 1988

Yvonne Pendelton

3 November 1997

Katherine Pering

8 and 1 1 January 2002

Tom Pierson

16 September 1992; 16 May 1997

Cyril Ponnamperuma

24 May 1982

Chris Romanek

12 May 1997

John Rummel

16 November 1997

2 September 1998

Carl Sagan

6 January 1993

Greg Schmidt

6 April 2000

Alan Schwartz

21-22 February 1999

Charles Seeger

31 May 1992

Adolph Smith

30 January 1997; 27 September 1998

William Stillwell

4 September 1998

Jill Tarter

15 September 1992

Richard S. Young

25 May 1982

Sources of Unpublished Materials

Krishna Bahadur papers, courtesy of Adolph Smith

Elso Barghoorn papers, courtesy of Lynn Margulis

A. Graham Cairns-Smith papers, courtesy of A. G. Cairns-Smith

Sidney Fox papers, courtesy of the late S. Fox

Norman Horowitz papers, California Institute of Technology Archives, Pasadena, Calif

Harold R Klein papers, courtesy of the late H. R Klein

Sol Kramer papers. University of Florida Special Collections, Gainesville, Fla.

Joshua Lederberg papers. National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Md.

Appendix A 235

Gilbert Levin papers, courtesy of G. Levin

James Lovelock papers, courtesy of J. Lovelock

Lynn Margulis papers, courtesy of L. Margulis

Harold Morowitz papers, George Mason University Archives, Fairfax, Va.

National Academy of Sciences Archives, papers on Space Sciences Board

NASA History Office, files on Exobiology Program

SETI Institute Archives

Carl Woese letter to R. Young, courtesy of C. Woese

Appendix B: NASA Leadership in Exobiology

NASA Administrators

T. Keith Glennan
James E. Webb
Thomas O. Paine
James C. Fletcher
Robert A. Frosch
James M. Beggs
James C. Fletcher
Richard H. Truly
Daniel S. Goldin
Sean O'Keefe

19 August 1958^20 January 1961
14 February 1961-7 October 1968
21 March 1969-15 September 1970
27April 1971-1 May 1977
21 June 1977-20 January 1981
10 July 1981^ December 1985
12 May 1986-8 April 1989
14 May 1989-31 March 1992

1 April 1992-17 November 2001
21 December 2001-

Note: Biographies of administrators and deputy administrators are available at the NASA
History Office Web site at http://www.hq.nasa.gov/oifice/pao/History/prsnnl.htm.

Headquarters Associate Administrator for Space Science

1958-1961/ 1963-1973''

1974-1979

1979(July)-1980

1981-1982

1982-1987

1987 (6 April)- 1993

1993-1998

1998-

Homer Newell
Noel Hirmers
Thomas Mutch
Andrew J. Stofan
Burton Edelson
Lennard Fisk
Wesley T. Huntress
Edward Weiler

^ Office of Space Science

*> Office of Space Science and Applications (OSSA) through 1993

236

Appendix B 237

Headquarters Life Sciences Directors

Orr Reynolds February 1962-1970 (Director of Bioscience Programs)

Gen. J. W. Humphreys 1 970- 1 972

Charles A. Berry 1972-1974

David Winter April 1974-April 1979

Gerald SoflFen April 1979-1983

Amauld Nicogossian 1983-March 1993

Harry HoUoway March 1993-April 1996

Amauld Nicogossian May 1 996-January 200 1

Kathie Olson January 200 1 -July 200 1

Mary Kicza 1 1 March 2002-

Note: The Office of Life and Microgravity Sciences was established on 8 March 1993
for the first time at the same level as the Office of Space Sciences. Joan Vemikos
was the director of its Life Sciences Division from April 1993 to August 2000. On
29 September 2000 the office was restructured to become the Office of Biological
and Physical Research.

Headquarters Exobiology Program Managers

Freeman Quimby August 1 963- 1 967

Richard S. Young^ 1 967-August 1 979

Donald DeVincenzi" August 1 979-1 2 December 1 986

John Rummel" 12 December 1986-1992

Michael Meyer> 1993-2002

Michael New 2002-

Note: The headquarters exobiology program managers were renamed "discipline scien-
tists" in the mid-1980s.

" Also planetary protection officer. Rummel resumed the position of planetary protec-
tion off icer in 1997.

Headquarters SETI Program Managers

Dick Henry 1977-1978

Jeffrey D. Rosendhal June 1 978-December 1979

Donald DeVincenzi 1979-1986

Lynn Griffiths (Harper) 1986-1988

Gary Coulter 1988-1993

NASA Research Ames Center Directors

Smith J. DeFrance 1 October 1958-15 October 1965

Harvey Julian Allen 15 October 1965-15 November 1968

Hans Mark 20 February 1969-15 August 1977

Clarence A. Syvertson 15 August 1977-13 January 1984

William F Ballhaus Jr. 16 January 1984-1 February 1988

238 Appendix B

Dale L. Compton 1 5 July 1 989-28 January 1 994"

Ken K. Munechika 28 January 1994-^ March 1996

Henry McDonald 4 March 1996-19 September 2002

Scott Hubbard 1 9 September 2002-

" Compton served as acting director from 1 February 1988 to 1 February 1989.

NASA Ames Life Science Directors

Webb Haymaker July 1961-1963

Harold P. "Chuck" Klein January 1964-May 1984
John Billingham 1984-1991

NASA Ames Space Science Division Chiefs

David Morrison 1988-1996

Donald DeVincenzi 1996-2003

NASA Ames Exobiology Division

Harold P. "Chuck" Klein 1963
Richard S. Young 1963-1967

L. P. "Pete" Zill

1967-1974

Keith Kvenvolden

1974-1975

John Billingham

1975-1986

Sherwood Chang

1987-1998

David Blake

2000-

Note: The Exobiology Division was named the "Extraterrestrial Research Division" un-
der Billingham. It became a branch under Life Sciences in 1986 and a branch un-
der Space Science in 1988.

NASA Ames SETI Office Chiefs

John Billingham 1991-1993

(Bernard M. Oliver, Deputy)

Jet Propulsion Laboratory Directors

William H. Pickering 1 October 1958-31 March 1976

Bruce C. Murray 1 April 1976-30 June 1982

Lew Allen Jr. 22 July 1 982-3 1 December 1 990

Edward C. Stone 1 January 1991-30 April 2001

Charles Elachi 1 May 200 1 -

Appendix C: Topics at First Astrobiology
Science Conference, April 2000

Topic Number of Poster Papers

Solar system dynamics 24

Planetary detection 1 1

Cosmic chemistry 9

Chirality and life 8

Meteorites and organic chemistry 7

Studies of prebiotic chemistry 35

Cosmochemistry missions 2

Habitable planets 1 7

Europa 3

Mars geology 1 1

Mars climatology 8

Mars oxidants 3

Mars missions 3

Microbes and Mars 3

Mars meteorites 14

Biomarkers 22

SETI 2

Ancient Earth / geochemistry 10

Rise of oxygen on Earth 8

Snowball Earth 5

Biogeochemistry 1 1

Impacts 4

Evolution of the genome 14

Evolution of metabohsm 11

Microbial community structure 3

Phylogeny 8

Life in extreme envirormients 34

Metazoan evolution 5

Life beyond the planet of origin 4

Education 14

Astrobiology programs 6

Source: From Abstracts, First Astrobiology Science Conference, 3-5 April 2000.

239

Appendix D: Objectives in the

astrobiology roadmap

(1999)

Question: How Does Life Begin and Develop?

Sources of Organics on Earth
Objective 1: Determine whether the atmosphere of the early Earth, hydrothermal
systems, or exogenous matter were significant sources of organic matter.

Origin of Life's Cellular Components
Objective 2: Develop and test plausible pathways by which ancient counterparts of
membrane systems, proteins, and nucleic acids were synthesized from simpler precur-
sors and assembled into protocells.

Models for Life
Objective 3: Replicate catalytic systems capable of evolution and construct laboratory
models of metabolism in primitive living systems.

Genomic Clues to Evolution
Objective 4: Expand and interpret the genomic database of a select group of key
microorganisms in order to reveal the history and dynamics of evolution.

Linking Planetary and Biological Evolution
Objective 5: Describe the sequences of causes and effects associated with the develop-
ment of Earth's early biosphere and the global environment.

Microbial Ecology
Objective 6: Define how ecophysiological processes structure microbial communities,
influence their adaptation and evolution, and affect their detection on other planets.

Question: Does Life Exist Elsewhere in the Universe?

The Extremes of Life
Objective 7: Identify the environmental limits for life by examining biological adapta-
tions to extremes in enviroimiental conditions.

240

Appendix D 241

Past and Present Life on Mars
Objective 8: Search for evidence of ancient climates, extinct life, and potential habitats
for extant life on Mars.

Life's Precursors and Habitats in the Outer Solar System
Objective 9: Determine the presence of life's chemical precursors and potential habitats
for life in the outer solar system.

Natural Migration of Life
Objective 10: Understand the natural processes by which life can migrate from one
world to another. Are we alone in the universe?

Origin of Habitable Planets
Objective 11: Determine (theoretically and empirically) the ultimate outcome of the
planet-forming process around other stars, especially the habitable ones.

Effects of Climate and Geology on Habitability
Objective 12: Define climatological and geological effects upon the limits of habitable
zones around the Sun and other stars to help define the frequency of habitable planets in
the universe.

Extrasolar Biomarkers
Objective 13: Define an array of astronomically detectable spectroscopic features that
indicate habitable conditions and/or the presence of life on an extrasolar planet.

Question: What Is Life's Future on Earth and Beyond?

Ecosystem Response to Rapid Environmental Change
Objective 14: Determine the resilience of local and global ecosystems through their
response to natural and human-induced disturbances.

Earth's Future Habitability
Objective 15: Model the future habitability of Earth by examining the interactions
between the biosphere and the chemistry and radiation balance of the atmosphere.

Bringing Life with Us beyond Earth
Objective 16: Understand the human-directed processes by which life can migrate from
one world to another.

Planetary Protection
Objective 1 7: Refine planetary protection guidelines and develop protection technology
for human and robotic missions.

Source: Astrobiology Roadmap, issued 6 January 1999. Refined Goals and Objectives,
issued in November 2002, are found at http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/roadmap/
goals_and_ objectives.html.

Notes

Introduction

1 . Tony Reichhardt, "NASA Lines Up for a Bigger Slice of the Biological Research
Pie," Nature 391 (8 January 1998): 109.

2. Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), chap. 5.

Chapter 1 The Big Picture

1 . Percival Lowell confined himself to planets in The Evolution of Worlds (New York:
Macmillan, 1909), and George EUery Hale dealt only with stars in The Study of
Stellar Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908). Among historians
stellar evolution has been treated in David DeVorkin's work on the development of
the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, but no history of ideas of cosmic evolution exists.

2. On the natural selection of universes, see Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Freeman Dyson proposes cosmic ecology,
in Infinite in All Directions (New York: Harper and Row, 1 988), 51. It is important
to note that evolution has general and specific meanings. When scientists speak
about "cosmic evolution," they usually have a general idea of "development" in
mind. When Smolin speaks of the "natural selection" of universes that may com-
pose the multiverse, he is applying the more specific idea of Darwinian evolution
to astronomy.

3. Harlow Shapley saw extraterrestrial life as one of four adjustments in humanity's
view of itself since ancient Greece (Of Stars and Men [Boston: Beacon Press, 1958],
104). Otto Struve compared the idea of extraterrestrial life to the Copemican theory
and the discovery that we were in a peripheral position in our galaxy {The Uni-
verse [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962], 157). Bernard M. Oliver and John
Billingham term the idea "biocosmology" ("Project Cyclops: A Design Study of a
System for Detecting Extraterrestrial Intelligence," Washington, D.C., 1971), and
Steven Dick makes the case in "The Concept of Extraterrestrial Intelligence — An
Emerging Cosmology," Planetary Report 9 (March-April 1989): 13-17; and The
Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the
Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1996), 542. See also

243

244 Notes to Pages 10-15

Dick, "Extraterrestrial Life and Our Worldview at the Turn of the Millennium"
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2000).

4. The close connection between philosophical issues in terrestrial and cosmic evolu-
tion are discussed in Dick, Biological Universe, 378-389. Thirteen authors with
diverse backgrounds explore some of the implications of the biological universe in
Steven J. Dick, ed.. Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial Life, and the
Theological Implications (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2000).

5. Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate. 1 750-1900 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1986), 224-225, 274-277, 464^65. Simon Schaffer has
shown the place of the nebular hypothesis in a general "science of progress" in
early Victorian Britain ("The Nebular Hypothesis and the Science of Progress," in
History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, ed. J. R. Moore [Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 131-164). On the role of Spencer and
Fiske in nineteenth-century origin of life debates, see James Strick, Sparks of Life:
Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. 94-95.

6. On spontaneous generation and Darwinism, see Strick, Sparks of Life. On Proctor
and Flammarion, see Crowe, Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 367-386. An early case
of nineteenth-century astronomical evolution which Lightman points to is the as-
tronomer/popularizer Robert S. Ball, "The Relation of Darwinism to Other Branches
of Science," Longman s Review 2 (November 1883): 76-92. See Bernard Lightman,
"The Story of Nature's Victorian Popularizers and Scientific Narrative," Victorian
Review 25, no. 2 (1999): 1-29.

7. On Lowell as Spencerian, and as influenced by Spencer's American disciple John
Fiske, see David Strauss, Percival Lowell: The Culture and Science of a Boston
Brahmin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 97-165; W. W.
Campbell, "The Daily Influences of Astronomy," Science 52, 10 December 1920,
540. David DeVorkin has found archival evidence that Hale's interest in cosmic
evolution extended beyond the physical universe to biology and culture ("Evolu-
tionary Thinking in American Astronomy from Lane to Russell," presented at a ses-
sion on "Evolution and Twentieth Century Astronomy," History of Science Society
meeting, Denver, Colo., 8 November 2001).

8. The quotation is from A. R. Wallace, "Man's Place in the Universe," Independent, 26
February 1903, 396. This argument was elaborated in Wallace, Man's Place in the
Universe (1903; rpt.. New York: Macmillan, 1904); the appendix is found in the Lon-
don 1904 edition on 326-336. On Wallace, see Martin Fichman, An Elusive Victo-
rian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2004); also Michael Shermer, In Darwin s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred
Russel Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); for Wallace's "heresy" in
breaking with Darwin on the matter of the evolution of the human brain, see 157-162.

9. L. J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment (New York: Macmillan, 1913), re-
printed with an introduction by Harvard biologist George Wald (Gloucester, Mass.:
Peter Smith, 1970), 312. The complexity of Henderson's ideas on the fitness of the
environment and their connection to modem ideas on the subject are analyzed in
detail in Iris Fry, "On the Biological Significance of the Properties of Matter: L. J.
Henderson's Theory of the Fitness of the Environment," Journal of the History of
Biology 29 (1996): 155-196.

10. Dick, Biological Universe, chap. 4.

Notes to Pages 15-25 245

1 1 . Spencer Jones, Life on Other Worlds (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 57. On Oparin,
see Iris Fry, The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), chap. 6; and Dick, Bio-
logical Universe, chap. 7. On the influence of Marxism, see Loren Graham, Sci-
ence and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1 972).

12. A. I. Oparin and V G. Fesenkov, Life in the Universe (New York: Twayne Publish-
ers, 1961); George Wald, "The Origin of Life," Scientific American (August 1954):
44.

13. For details of SETI history, see Dick, Biological Universe, chap. 8.

14. Joseph Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe (San Francisco;
Holden-Day, 1966). In May 1964 the Armenian Academy of Sciences sponsored a
meeting on extraterrestrial intelligence at Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory; the
proceedings, published in 1965, are available in English in Extraterrestrial Civili-
zations, ed. G. M. Tovmasyan (Jerusalem: Israeli Program for Scientific Transla-
tions, 1967). For a list of additional Soviet meetings, see Dick, Biological Universe,
484-^85.

15. Jo Ann Palmieri has discussed the popularization of the idea of cosmic evolution
in "Popular and Pedagogical Uses of Cosmic Evolution," presented at a session on
"Evolution and Twentieth Century Astronomy," History of Science Society meet-
ing, Denver, Colo., 8 November 2001.

16. Otto Struve, "Life on Other Worlds," Sky and Telescope 14 (February 1955): 137-
146; Joshua Lederberg, "Exobiology: Experimental Approaches to Life beyond the
Earth," in Science in Space, ed. Lloyd V. Berkner and Hugh Odishaw (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1961), 407^25; John Billingham, Life in the Universe (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), ix.

17. In 1960 the NSF's John Wilson looked forward to funding space biology. But NASA
took an early dominant lead, which it has continued to hold. By 1963 NASA's life
sciences expenditures (including exobiology) had already reached $17.5 million.
Toby Appel, Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and American Bio-
logical Research, 1952-1975 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 132.

18. George Gaylord Simpson, "The Non-Prevalence of Humanoids," Science 143, 21
February 1964,769-775.

Chapter 2 Organizing Exobiology

1 . Joshua Lederberg, "Spumik + 30," Journal of Genetics (India), 66 (December 1 987):
217. Much of Lederberg 's early involvement in exobiology is discussed here.
Lederberg repeated this story in interviews with numerous historians, including our-
selves and Audra Wolfe.

2. Lest one think such ideas only wild fancies worthy of the height of the Cold War,
it is worth noting that Carl Sagan was hired in 1958 by the Department of Defense
(through the Armour Research Foundation) for Project A 1 1 9, to make calculations
for what would result from detonating nuclear bombs on the moon. Keay Davidson,
Carl Sagan: A Life (New York: Wiley, 1999), 93-95.

3. Joshua Lederberg and Dean B. Cowie, "Moondust," Science 127, 27 June 1958,
1473-1475.

4. See, e.g., Lederberg to Harrison Brown, 19 January 1961, Lederberg papers, NLM;
also "Earthlike Life Unlikely on Moon or Planets, Scientist Contends," Phil Abelson

246 Notes to Pages 25-26

being the scientist quoted in Washington Post. 11 December 1961, 1-2. Abelson
had been one of the first to replicate and extend Miller's results experimentally, in
1956, and since that time had been a key participant at scientific meetings on the
origin of life.

5. Phil Abelson, "Extra-terrestrial Life," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci-
ences (PNAS) 47 ( 1 96 1 ): 575-58 1 .

6. Sagan to Lederberg, 20 February 1959. Lederberg papers, NLM.

7. William Poundstone, Car! Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos (New York: Henry Holt,
1999).

8. Lederberg to Harry Eagle, March 1958; also Lederberg to Robert Jastrow, 4 March
1959, Lederberg papers, NLM.

9. Lederberg notes: "The irony of advocating a parochial approach to cosmic ques-
tions has not escaped me. But I was exhausted from traveling!" Lederberg to Strick,
personal communication, 22 December 2002.

10. Edward C. Ezell and Linda N. Ezell, On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet. 1958-
1978. NASA SP-4212 (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1984), 63-64. The minutes of
this meeting and an informal preliminary meeting of 4 December 1958 (Richard
Davies's copies) can be found in JPL Archives, tld 2-1067a and 1067c.

11. Susan Spath, "C. B. Van Niel and the Culture of Microbiology, 1920-1965" (Ph.D.
diss.. University of California -Berkeley, 1999), esp. app. 2.

12. Stanley Miller, "A Production of Amino Acids under Possible Primitive Earth Con-
ditions," Science 117, 15 May 1953, 528-529; reprinted in David W. Deamer and
Gail R. Fleischaker, eds.. Origins of Life: The Central Concepts (Boston: Jones and
Bartlett, 1994), 147-148. For a somewhat historical assessment of the Miller-Urey
experiment after fifty years, see Jeff Bada and Antonio Lazcano, "Prebiotic Soup:
Revisiting the Miller Experiment," Science 300, 2 May 2003, 745-746.

13. Sidney Fox, "Evolution of Protein Molecules and Thermal Synthesis of Biochemi-
cal Substances," American Scientist 44 (October 1956): 347-359. For contempo-
rary biographies, photos, and research interests of Fox, Miller, Abelson, Calvin,
Lilly, Orr Reynolds, Carl Sagan, Harold Urey, and WolfVishniac, see Shirley Tho-
mas, Men of Space: Profiles of the Leaders in Space Research. Development, and
Exploration, vol. 6 (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1963).

14. Alexander Oparin, The Origin of Life. English trans. S. Morgulis (New York: Mac-
millan, 1938). By 1957 he had significantly developed and expanded it, especially
the role for dialectical materialist thinking: see Oparin, The Origin of Life on the
Earth. 3d rev. ed., English trans. Ann Synge (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1957).

15. Stanley Miller, J. William Schopf, and Antonio Lazcano, "Oparin's Origin of Life:
Sixty Years Later," Journal of Molecular £vo/ution 44 (1997): 351-353; see also
A. Lazcano, "Chemical Evolution and the Primitive Soup: Did Oparin Get It All
Right?" Journal of Theoretical Biology 184 (1997): 219-223. On the prehistory
and early days of exobiology, see Steven J. Dick, The Biological Universe (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); see also Iris Fry, The Emergence of
Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 2000); and Audra Wolfe, "Germs in Space: Joshua Lederberg, Exo-
biology, and the Public Imagination, 1958-1964," Isis 93 (June 2002): 183-205.

16. Miller OHI, 2 February 1997, 2; note that all dollar amounts throughout this book
are given in the contemporary figures of the period in question, not adjusted to
current dollar values. I would like to thank Dr. Miller for sharing with me an un-

Notes to Pages 26-29 247

published note on the subject of funding. In it he laments that the unofficial "boot-
legging" procedure, to support "almost all really original work," is now untenable
in an age of intensely scrutinized review of how grant dollars are spent. However
small NSF's initial investment in Miller (related to earlier papers he had published,
suggesting his promise as a chemist), in testimony before Congress in late 1955
NSF program officer Alan T. Waterman was happy to cite support for Miller as a
good example that NSF had invested wisely in its research, stating that "this work
had been listed in a Fortune magazine article as one of ten major discoveries in
basic research in the past year." See Toby Appel, Shaping Biology: The National
Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945-1975 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 104-105.

17. The proceedings of this conference were published as F. Clark and R. L. Synge,
eds.. Proceedings of the First International Symposium on the Origin of Life on
the Earth (New York: Pergamon Press, 1959). Another participant in the 1957 con-
ference was the soon-to-be discredited Lysenkoist biologist Olga Lepeschinskaya.
On her origin of life claims, see L. N. Zhinkin and V R Mikhailov, "On 'the New
Cell Theory,"' Science 128 (1958): 182-186; see also L. J. Rather, Addison and
the White Corpuscles (London: Wellcome Institute, 1972), 218-219; Valery Soyfer,
Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1994); and, most recently, Larisa Shumeiko, "Der lebende Stoffund die
Umwandlung der Arten Die "neue" Zellentheorie von Ol'ga Borisovna Lepesinskaja
(1871-1963)," in Uwe HoCfeld and Rainer Bromer, eds., Darwinismus und/als
Ideologic (Berlin: VWB-Verlag, 2001), 213-228.

18. Loren Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1987), esp. chap. 3.

19. Erwin ChargafF, The Heraclitean Fire (New York: Rockefeller University Press,
1978), 142-144; See also ChargafF OHI, 1-3.

20. Miller OHI, 18 February 1997 and 23 February 1999.

21. Lederberg had missed the Moscow meeting because of the opportunity to work at
a lab in Australia; Lederberg to Horowitz, 4 March 1958, Horowitz papers 4.3, Cali-
fornia Institute of Technology Archives (hereafter Horowitz papers).

22. Lederberg, "Exobiology: Approaches to Life beyond the Earth," Science 132, 12
August 1960, 393-400. Lederberg's first published use of exobiology is in his paper
delivered at the first meeting of the international Council on Space Research
(COSPAR) in Nice, France, 1 1-16 January 1960; "Exobiology: Experimental Ap-
proaches to Life beyond the Earth," in Space Research: Proceedings of the First
International Space Science Symposium, ed. H. K. Kallmann Bijl (Amsterdam:
North-Holland, 1960), 1153-1170.

23. NASA Third Semiannual Report to Congress, 1 October 1959-3 1 March 1960, 90,
158-159; NASA Fifth Semiannual Report to Congress, 1 October 1960-30 June
1961, 133-135.

24. There is extensive literature on scientific discipline formation. For just two usefiil
examples, see Robert Kohler, From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981); and David Edge and Michael Mulkay, As-
tronomy Transformed: The Emergence of Radio Astronomy in Britain (New York:
Wiley, 1976).

25. See, e.g., George Gaylord Simpson, "The Nonprevalence of Humanoids," Science
143, 21 February 1964, 769-775.

248 Notes to Pages 30-32

26. See E. O. Wilson, Naturalist (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994), chap. 12: "The
Molecular Wars." The tensions between these biologists and the "molecularizing"
group are explored thoroughly by Michael Dietrich in "Paradox and Persuasion:
Negotiating the Place of Molecular Evolution within Evolutionary Biology," Jour-
nal of the History of Biology 1>\ (1998): 85-1 11.

27. Donald DeVincenzi OHI, 11 February 1997; see also Dick, Biological Universe;
and James Stride, "The Cambrian Explosion (of Books on the Origin of Life),"
Journal of the History of Biology 33 (2000): 371-384.

28. Lederberg diary entry, 29 July 1959; courtesy of Joshua Lederberg.

29. See Wolfe, "Germs in Space," 190. This fear was borne out on more than one oc-
casion. An early example occurred in August 1967, when Congress completely can-
celed funding of the Voyager Mars mission scheduled for the late 1960s. After the
race riots ravaged many U.S. cities that summer, spending on exploring Mars sud-
denly appeared politically inexpedient. See Ezells, On Mars, 1 10-118.

30. On the relegating of science to a far-back seat in Project Mercury, see, e.g., Tom
Wolfe, The Right Stuff (Nev/ York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1 979), chap. 1 3 .

31. Horowitz to Lederberg, 16 and 19 May 1960, Horowitz papers 1 1.3.

32. NASA Second Semiannual Report to the Congress, 1 April-30 September 1959, 209.

33. Vishniac, "Space Flights and Biology," Science 144, 17 April 1964, 245-246; Fox,
"Humanoids and Proteinoids," Science 144, 22 May 1964, 954.

34. Gilbert Levin, "Significance and Status of Exobiology," BioScience, 15 (January
1965): 17-20 (a paper presented at the American Institute of Biological Sciences
annual meeting, 26 August 1964, 17).

35. Ibid., 18-19.

36. Isaac Asimov, "A Science in Search of a Subject," New York Times Magazine, 23
May 1965, 52-58.

37. Dana Hedgpeth, "The Man Who Wants to Return to Mars," Washington Post, 1 De-
cember 2000, Al, 10-11.

38. NASA Fifth Semiannual Report to Congress, 1 October 1960-30 June 1961, 204;
NASA Ninth Semiannual Report, 198; Eleventh Report, 220.

39. NASA Fifth Report, 202, 206, 212, 214.

40. NASA Sixth Semiannual Report to Congress, July-December 1962, 174, 180.

41. See M. Scott Blois, "Random Polymers as a Matrix for Chemical Evolution," in
The Origins of Prebiological Systems and Their Molecular Matrices, ed. Sidney
Fox (New York: Academic Press, 1965), 19-38.

42. NASA Sixth Semiannual Report to Congress, 1 July-31 December 1961, 173, 174,
180-181; see Charles R. Phillips and Robert K. Hoffman, "Sterilization of Inter-
planetary Vehicles," Science 132, 14 October 1960, 991-995. For more on the exo-
biology sterilization / Fort Detrick germ warfare connection, see Wolfe, "Germs in
Space," 199-203; Wolfe has written persuasively here on the cultural implications,
in a Cold War context, of rhetoric about "contamination" and "containment" of such
contaminants.

43. NASA Seventh Semiannual Report to Congress.

44. Henry S. F. Cooper, The Search for Life on Mars (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1980), 96.

45. Hedgpeth, "Man Who"; Gilbert Levin OHI.

46. Horowitz to Lederberg, 18 May 1962, Horowitz papers 16.5.

47. See the winter 1963 issue of Stanford Today, including articles on exobiology by

Notes to Pages 32-36 249

Lederberg and on Multivator and "exobiology at Stanford" by Levinthal (the cover
story). The Multivator project is also discussed in Wolfe, "Germs in Space," 194-
195.

48. NASA Tenth Semiannual Report to Congress, 216; NASA Eleventh Semiannual
Report to Congress, 216.

49. Appe\, Shaping Biology, 145, table 5.2a.

50. NASA Twelfth Semiannual Report to Congress, 149.

51. NASA Ninth Semiannual Report to Congress, 198; Eleventh Report, 223; Sidney
Fox OHI , 1 February 1993, 33.

52. NASA Eleventh Semiannual Report to Congress, January-June 1964, 238.

53. Lederberg to Pittendrigh, 5 April 1962, Lederberg papers; in 1968 Pittendrigh moved
to Stanford, joining Lederberg's exobiology group there.

54. NASA Eleventh Report, 238; Slepecky to Strick, 12 November 1999; NASA Ninth
Semiannual Report, 198.

55. Richard S. Young, Paul H. Deal, Joan Bell, and Judith L. Allen, "Bacteria under
Simulated Martian Conditions," in Life Sciences and Space Research, ed. M. Florkin
and A. Dollfus, 2 (1964): 105-111; see also Young, Deal, and O. Whitfield, "The
Response of Spore-Forming vs. Nonspore-Forming Bacteria to Diurnal Freezing
andThawing," Space Life Sciences 1 (1968): 113-117.

56. NASA Ninth Semiannual Report, January-June 1963, 193.

57. NASA Twelfth Semiannual Report, July-December 1964, 64.

58. NASA Tenth Semiannual Report, July-December 1963, 219.

59. DeVincenzi OHI, 21 January 1997.

60. By 30 June 1961 the NASA Space Sciences Steering Committee chair was Homer
Newell; BioScience Subcommittee chair was Quimby; the secretary was Richard
Young; members were Siegfried Gerathewohl, George L Jacobs, Jack Posner, and
G. D. Smith; with consultants Abelson, Calvin, Fox, Horowitz, Linschitz, Colin
Pittendrigh, Ernest Pollard, and Carl Sagan. By early 1962 Orr Reynolds (physi-
ologist and head of research at the Office of Defense Research and Engineering)
"came to NASA to take charge of the biology division in the new Office of Space
Sciences." Homer Newell, Beyond the Atmosphere: Early Years of Space Science
(Washington, D.C.: NASA, 198), 276.

61. See Lederberg to Young, 21 December 1961, Lederberg papers. On the history of
Ames Research Center overall, see Elizabeth Muenger, Searching the Horizon: A
History of Ames Research Center, 1940-1976, NASA SP-4304 (Washington,
D.C.:NASA, 1985); see also the more recent history by Glenn Bugos, Atmosphere
of Freedom: Sixty Years at the NASA Ames Research Center, NASA SP-43 14 (Wash-
ington, D.C.: NASA, 2000).

62. RichardYoungOHI, 3.

63. NRC postdocs at Ames included, after Ponnamperuma, Henry Speer, Duane
Rohlfing, Klaus Dose, Janos Lanyi, Linda Caren, Alan Schwartz, Ellen Weaver,
Don DeVincenzi, Akiva Bar-nun, William Bonner, Clair Folsome, Richard Turco,
Rivers Singleton, George Yuen, Carleton Moore, Norm Gabel, Noam Lahav, Jill
Tarter, Owen Toon, James Ferris, Thomas Ackerman, Lelia Coyne, Adolph Smith,
Neal Blair, James Kasting, Amos Banin, Chris McKay, Louis Allamandola, Kim
Wedeking, Friedemann Freund, John Rummel, Kevin Zahnle, David Blake, Lynn
Rothschild, Chris Chyba, Jack Farmer, and LuAnn Becker, to name only a few
whose names continued to be recognized in exobiology, many still today; see NRC

250 Notes to Pages 36-42

Directory of Resident Research Associates, 1959-1995 (Washington, D.C.: NAS
Press, 1996), 14-261.

64. Ponnamperama OHl, 24 May 1982, 2.

65. Ibid., 3.

66. Klein, A Personal History (Mountain View, Calif. : privately printed, 1 998), chap. 1 8.

67. Katherine Paring OHI, 8 January 2002; Keith Kvenvolden OHI, 4 January 2002.
When friction soon developed between Kvenvolden and Ponnamperuma, they seem
to have had differing perceptions of what Kvenvolden had actually been hired to
do. Kvenvolden believed he had been hired to head up and supervise the lunar
sample lab. Ponnamperuma seems to have thought he had hired Kvenvolden as just
one more staff scientist in the Chemical Evolution branch, all, including the sample
lab, under Ponnamperuma 's control.

68. DeVincenzi OHI, 4 February 1997; Kvenvolden OHI.

69. John Jungck OHI, 10 November 1999; Alan Schwartz to Strick, personal commu-
nication, 21 February 1999.

70. See report by Richard Young and Cyril Ponnamperuma of NASA Ames Research
Center, "Life: Origin and Evolution," Science 143, 24 January 1964, 385-388; see
also Young OHI, 7-8. The proceedings were published as Sidney Fox, ed.. The Ori-
gins of Prebiological Systems and of Their Molecular Matrices (New York: Aca-
demic Press, 1965).

71. Sidney Fox, The Emergence of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 10-11; Fox
OHI, 27 January 1993.

72. Sidney Fox, Kaoru Harada, and Jean Kendrick, "Production of Spherules from Syn-
thetic Proteinoid and Hot Water," Science 129, I May 1959, 1221-1223.

73. For progressively stronger claims, see Sidney Fox, "How Did Life Begin?" Sci-
ence 132, 22 July 1960, 200-208; "A Theory of Macromolecular and Cellular Ori-
gins," Nature 205, 23 January 1965, 328-340; "Spontaneous Generation, the Origin
of Life, and Self- Assembly," Current Modern Biology 2 (1968): 235-240; "The
Proteinoid Theory of the Origin of Life and Competing Ideas," American Biology
Teacher 36 (March 1974): 161-172, 181; S. W. Fox and Klaus Dose, Molecular
Evolution and the Origin of Life (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1972).

74. See, e.g. Fox, Emergence, 173-176.

75. Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey, "Organic Compound Synthesis on the Primi-
tive Earth," Science 130, 31 July 1959, 245-251.

76. Sidney Fox, "Origin of Life," Science 130, 1 1 December 1959, 1622-1623.

77. S. L. Miller and H. C. Urey, "Reply," Science 130, 1 1 December 1959, 1623-1624.

78. This attitude, the dominant paradigm in the immediate aftermath of the Miller-Urey
experiment, was well portrayed in George Wald's article "The Origin of Life," Sci-
entific American 192 (August 1954): 44-53.

79. Norman Horowitz OHI, 15 January 1999, 8; Miller OHI, 9-10.

80. Stanley Miller and Leslie Orgel, The Origins of Life on the Earth (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 145. Horowitz to Miller, 7 June 1972, Horowitz papers,
4.34, CalTech archives.

81. See, e.g., S. W Fox, K. Harada, R E. Hare, G. Hinsch, G. Mueller, "Bio-organic
Compounds and Glassy Particles in Lunar Fines and Other Materials," Science 1 67,
30 January 1970, 161-110; Kvenvolden OHI, 4 January 2002.

82. Fox, "Proteinoid Theory."

Notes to Pages 42-49 251

83. See S. W. Fox and Aristotel Pappelis, "Synthetic Molecular Evolution and
Protocells," Quarterly Review of Biology 68 (March 1993): 79-82; see also Alan
Schwartz's obituary of his former mentor, "Sidney W. Fox, 1912-1998," Origins
of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 29 (1999): 1-3.

84. William Day, Genesis on Planet Earth (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Talcs, 1979). Day's book
was reviewed prominently and favorably by Lynn Margulis, who also helped ar-
range the publication of a second, revised edition by Yale University Press in 1984.
See also, more recently, W. Day, How Life Began (Cambridge, Mass.: Foundation
for New Directions, 2002).

85. OHI with Miller, Horowitz, DeVincenzi, William Day, William Stillwell, Adolph
Smith, John Jungck, and Lynn Margulis (Jungck, Day, and Stillwell were doctoral
students or postdocs in Fox's lab); James R Ferris, "Review of Fox's Emergence of
Lifer Nature 337, 16 February 1989, 609-610; William Hagan, "Review of Fox's
Emergence ofLifel" his 80 (1989): 162-163. See also Andre Brack, "Review of
Chemical Evolution: Physics of the Origins and Evolution of Lifer Origins of Life
and Evolution of the Biosphere 29 (1999): 110.

86. Albert Lehninger, Biochemistry, 2d ed. (New York: Worth, 1975), chap. 37: "The
Origin of Life."

87. Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada (a doctoral student of Stanley Miller's), e.g.,
call Fox an "excellent self-promoter" and strongly imply, without saying outright,
that he duped NASA officials into thinking his work was important for the origin
of life. See their book The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2000), 52-55.

88. See DeVincenzi, "NASA's Exobiology Program," Origins of Life 14 (1984): 796.

89. Ponnamperuma OHI, 7.

90. See David Buhl and Cyril Ponnamperuma, "Interstellar Molecules and the Origin
of Life," Space Life Sciences 3 (Fall 1971): 157-164. See also Richard Young, "The
Beginning of Comparative Planetology," lecture delivered at Special Symposium
on Photochemistry and the Origin of Life, August 1972, Origins of Life 4 (1973):
505-515.

9 1 . Jan Sapp, Beyond the Gene: Cytoplasmic Inheritance and the Struggle for Author-
ity in Genetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). On the development of
Margulis's SET, see Sapp, Genesis: The Evolution of Biology (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2003), chap. 19.

92. Lynn Margulis OHI, 23-24 June 1998, 1.

93. Ibid.

94. By 1986 Margulis's yearly funding had reached $87,000; for 1987 $87,891 ; for 1988
$90,000; for 1989 $89,850; and for 1990 $89,850 (of $125,000 requested), Margulis
papers. In 1977 Woese was already requesting $73,000; by the early 1990s he was
requesting $125,000 and was receiving most of this; Woese to Strick, personal com-
munication, 14 January 2002.

95. See J. William Schopf, Cradle of Life: The Discovery of Earth's Earliest Fossils
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), chap. 2.

96. Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (New York: Oxford University Press,
1979), 10. Lovelock had found most of the older scientists at the meeting, espe-
cially Preston Cloud, unsympathetic to his ideas; see Margulis OHI, 23 June 1998,
6; see also Lovelock, Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist (New

252 Notes to Pages 49-56

York; Oxford University Press, 2000), 239-240. See chaps. 4-5 for more on the later
fortunes of the Gaia hypothesis and its relations with other developments in exobiology.

97. John Rummel OHl, 2 September 1998, 8.

98. Homer Newell, Beyond the Atmosphere: Early Years of Space Science, NASA SP-
421 1 (Washington, D.C.: NASA), chap. 16.

99. Ibid., 278-282. The NAS report was edited by Bentley Glass, Life Sciences in Space:
Report from the Space Science So«rc/ (Washington, D.C.: NAS, 1970).

100. DeVincenzi OHI, 21 January 1997, 1-2; Carleton Moore OHI, 9 January 2002.

101. Moore OHI.

102. DeVincenzi OHI, 21 January 1997, 1-2; also Young OHI, 8-9.

103. DeVincenzi OHI, 1-2.

104. Fry, Emergence. 88. The point is similarly made, Fry says, in Manfred Eigen's Steps
toward Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 31-32.

105. Quoted in Ezeils, On Mars, 235.

106. Ibid.

107. Horowitz to Lederberg, 18 May 1962, Horowitz papers 16.5; emphasis added.

108. DeVincenzi OHI. 21 January 1997, 2-3; Rummel OHI, 15; Young OHI, 5-7.

109. See, e.g., Mamikunian and Michael Briggs, '"Organized Elements' in Carbonaceous
Meteorites," Science 139. 8 March 1963, 873.

110. Ponnamperuma OHI, 4-5.

111. Ibid., 5.

1 12. See, e.g., Oro to Horowitz, 27 October 1972, Horowitz papers 5.1 1.

113. N. H. Horowitz and Jerry S. Hubbard, "The Origin of Life," Annual Reviews of
Genetics %{\91A):l,n.

1 14. Horowitz to Elso Barghoorn, 19 July 1972; Horowitz to Frank Drake, 19 July 1972;
and Horowitz to Barghoorn, 2 August 1972, Horowitz papers, 4.34, CalTech Ar-
chives.

115. Miller received his first NASA grant only at the time oi Mariner 4, for which he
helped design an instrument. Miller OHI, 18 February 1997, 14.

1 16. Horowitz to Paul D. Boyer, 27 July 1972, Horowitz papers.

1 17. Simpson was interviewed for "Life in Darwin's Universe" by Gene Bylinsky pub-
lished in Omni (September 1979): 63-66, 1 16.

Chapter 3 Exobiology, Planetary Protection, and the Origins of Life

1. See, e.g., Ponnamperuma, Richard Lemmon, Ruth Mariner, and Melvin Calvin,
"Formation of Adenine by Electron Irradiation of Methane, Ammonia and Water,"
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 49. 15 May 1963, 737-740; Pon-
namperuma, Ruth Mariner, and Cart Sagan, "Formation of Adenosine by Ultravio-
let Irradiation of a Solution of Adenine and Ribose," Nature 198, 22 June 1963,
1199-1200; Ponnamperuma, Sagan, and Mariner, "Synthesis of ATP under Pos-
sible Primitive Earth Conditions," Nature 199, 20 July 1963, 222-226;
Ponnamperuma, "Abiological Synthesis of Some Nucleic Acid Constituents," in The
Origins of Prebiological Systems, ed. Sidney Fox (New York: Academic Press,
1965), 221-242; "Primordial Organic Chemistry and the Origin of Life," Quar-
terly Review of Biophysics 4 (January 1971): 77-106; The Origins of Life (New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), a popular work; Ponnamperuma, ed.. Exobiology
(Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1972).

Notes to Pages 57-62 253

2. This resonates with a criticism still being made today, now of astrobiology. Michael
Drake and Bruce Jakosky are still urging that the field remember not to become
so focused on those bodies where it is hoped to find life, lest it fail to develop the
comparative knowledge of other worlds needed to fully understand the effect of
differing environmental conditions. See "Narrow Horizons in Astrobiology," A'a-
ture 415, 14 February 2002, 733-734.

3. Daniel S. Greenberg, "Soviet Space Feat," Science 137, 24 August 1962, 590-592.

4. Carl Bruch, "Instrumentation for the Detection of Extraterrestrial Life," in Biol-
ogy and the Exploration of Mars, ed. Colin Pittendrigh, Wolf Vishniac, and J. P. T.
Pearman (Washington, D.C.: NAS Press, 1966), 487-502. For a more popular ac-
count, see "Exobiology: The Search for Life on Mars," Time, 1 May 1965, 80-81.

5. Bruch, "Instrumentation," 494-495. For photos, see NASA Tenth Semiannual Re-
port to Congress, July-December 1963, 84-85; see also E. Levinthal, "Payload to
MiTS," Stanford Today, sen 1, no.7 (Winter 1963): 10-15.

6. Pittendrigh et al.. Biology.

7. "Exobiology: The Search for Life on Mars," Time, 7 May 1965, 80.

8. The "one gene, one enzyme" hypothesis was developed by George Beadle and Ed-
ward Tatum while Horowitz was a young researcher in Beadle's group. This was
the belief that genes controlled the nature of an organism by coding on a one-for-
one basis for the enzymes that control the metabolism. It was later modified to
"one gene, one polypeptide" to include nonenzyme proteins important to the or-
ganism in other ways.

9. Lederberg to Horowitz, January 1963, Horowitz papers 4.3.

10. Horowitz to Lederberg, 23 Jan. 1963, Horowitz papers 4.3.

1 1 . Charles R. Phillips, The Planetary Quarantine Program: Origins and Achievements,
NASA SP-4902 (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1974), 5. See also Morton Werber, Ob-
jectives and Models of the Planetary Quarantine Program, NASA SP-344 (Wash-
ington, D.C.: NASA, 1975). A more recent update is Space Studies Board, National
Research Council (NRC), Biological Contamination of Mars (Washington, D.C.:
NRC, 1992); see also Donald DeVincenzi, Margaret Race, and Harold Klein, "Plan-
etary Protection, Sample Return Missions, and Mars Exploration: History, Status
andFutuK'Needs," Journal of Geophysical Research 103 (November 1998): 28577-
28585. On Sagan and Lederberg's basic stance, see Carl Sagan OHI.

12. NASA Tenth Semiannual Report to Congress, July-December 1963, 84-85.

13. Brown, "'Back Contamination' and Quarantine: Problems and Perspectives," in
Pittendrigh et al.. Biology, 443^45.

14. Horowitz, memo, "Back-contamination and the Goals of Exobiological Research,"
attached to Horowitz letter to Lederberg, 6 February 1960, Horowitz papers 1 1.3.

15. Lederberg to Horowitz, 8 February 1960, Horowitz papers 1 1.3.

16. Aaron Novick memo to WESTEX 5-C, 19 February 1959 [sic] (actually 1960);
attached to letter fi-om Novick to Lederberg, 19 February 1960, Horowitz papers
11.3.

17. Horowitz to Strick, personal communication, 10 February 2002.

18. DeVincenzi and Rummel OHI.

19. Morowitz, "Requirements of q Minimum Free Living Replicating System," in
Marcel Florkin, ed.. Life Sciences and Space Research 3 (1965): 149-153.

20. Morowitz to Strick, personal communication, 31 March 2002.

21. Ibid., 3 April 2002.

254 Notes to Pages 62-64

11. Clair Folsome and Harold Morowitz, "Prebiological Membranes: Synthesis and
Properties," Space Life Sciences 1 (1969): 538-544.

23. Morowitz, Energy Flow in Biology: Biological Organization as a Problem in Ther-
mal Physics (1968; rpt., New Haven, Conn.: OxBow Press 1993).

24. Morowitz to Stride, personal communication, 3 April 2002.

25. Woese to Morowitz, 12 August 1977, Morowitz papers, fid 5.20, George Mason
University, Fairfax, Va. (hereafter Morowitz papers).

26. Lederberg to Young, 1 8 November 1 976, Lederberg papers, NLM.

27. Woese to Morowitz, 12 August 1977, Morowitz papers, fid. 5.20.

28. Clair Edwin Folsome, The Origin of Life: A Warm Little Pond (San Francisco:
W. H. Freeman, 1979), 73; see also John Allen, Biosphere 2: The Human
Experiment (New York: Penguin, 1990), 13-14. Folsome collaborated with Adolph
Smith and Krishna Bahadur on "autotrophs first" origin of life experiments; see
nn. 77-78.

29. See, e.g., Bruce Weber, "Emergence of Life and Biological Selection from the Per-
spective of Complex Systems Dynamics," in Evolutionary Systems, ed. G. Van de
Vijver et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 59-66; "Closure in the Emergence and Evo-
lution of Life: Multiple Discourses or One?" Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences AQ\ (2000): 132-138.

30. Morowitz, B. Heinz, and D. W. Deamer, "The Chemical Logic of a Minimal
Protocell," Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 18 (1988): 281.

31. Morowitz, "Phase Separation, Charge Separation, and Biogenesis," Biosystems 14
(1981): 41^7. He had published in support of Mitchell's chemiosmotic ideas since
at least 1978. See J. F. Nagle and H. J. Morowitz, "Molecular Mechanisms for Proton
Transport in Membranes," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 75
(January 1978): 298-302.

32. Morowitz, Mayonnaise and the Origin of Life (New York: Scribners, 1985). The
title essay (27-30) explains the properties of amphiphilic molecules such as leci-
thin which make them essential for living membranes as well as for the emulsified
nature of salad dressing.

33. Morowitz, The Beginnings of Cellular Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1992).

34. See, e.g., Morowitz, Jennifer Kostelnik, Jeremy Yang, and George Cody, "The Origin
of Intermediary Metabolism," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
97, 5 July 2000, 7704-7708.

35. Morowitz to Strick, personal communication, 3 April 2002.

36. Danielli had been the initial Ph.D. advisor to Peter Mitchell, before he left Cam-
bridge University; by Quastler, see "Introduction to Symposium on Theoretical Ra-
diobiology," American Naturalist 94 (January-February 1960): 57-58.

37. Minutes of Meeting of Theoretical Biology, Nassau Inn, Princeton, N.J., 30 Octo-
ber 1962, Morowitz papers, fid 5. 4a.

38. NASA Eleventh Semiannual Report to Congress, 242.

39. Ernest C. Pollard, "The Fine Structure of the Bacterial Cell and the Possibility of
Its Artificial Synthesis," American Scientist 53 (1965): 437^63.

40. Yeas is credited with priority for this idea by Antonio Lazcano and Stanley Miller
in "On the Origin of Metabolic Pathways," Journal of Molecular Evolution 49
(1999): 424-431. For Ycas's original papers, see "A Note on the Origin of Life,"

Notes to Pages 64-67 255

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 41,15 October 1955, 714-716;
and "On the Earlier States of the Biochemical System," Journal of Theoretical Bi-
ology 44 (\914): 145-160.

41. On the planning of the 1968 summer institute, see 12 October 1967, meeting of
Committee on Theoretical Biology, Cosmos Club, Washington D.C. (minutes in
Morowitz papers, fid 5.4a). Present at the meeting were: D. R. Beem, Danielli,
Engelberg, Gregg, H. Hollister, G. Jacobs, Jehle, Morowitz, J. R. Olive, Pollard,
and W. D. Taylor.

42. Elsasser, The Physical Foundation of Biology (New York: Pergamon Press, 1958);
Atom and Organism: A New Approach to Theoretical Biology (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1966); Reflections on a Theory of Organisms (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1 998).

43. Morowitz to Strick, personal communication, 31 March 2002.

44. Elso Barghoorn and Stanley Tyler, "Microorganisms from the Gunflint Chert," Sci-
ence 147 (February 1965): 563-577; J. W. Schopf had also done work on this pa-
per; Preston Cloud, "Significance of the Gunflint (Precambrian) Microflora,"
Science 148, 2 April 1965, 27-35.

45. Thomas Brock, "Life at High Temperatures," Science 158, 24 November 1967,
1012-1019. Brock was anticipated in the hypothesis of a high-temperature origin
of life by earlier Yellowstone researcher R. B. Harvey, in "Enzymes of Thermal
Algae," Science 60, 21 November 1924, 481-482. Brock wrote an update of the
subject under the same title in 1985, when undersea hydrothermal vent discover-
ies, Woese's revelations about the Archaea, and proliferating theories about the rel-
evance of hyperthermophiles for the origin of life produced a surge of new data
and interest in the subject. See Brock, "Life at High Temperatures," Science 230,
11 October 1985, 132-138.

46. Brock, "Life (1967)," 1017.

47. Brock to Strick, personal communication, 4 February 1999; Brock OHl.

48. For the Surtsey research, see Cyril Ponnamperuma, Richard Young, and Linda
Caren, "Some Chemical and Microbiological Studies of Surtsey," Surtsey Research
Project Report 3 (1968): 70-80; my thanks to Dr. Caren for a copy of the paper
and for the story about Ponnamperuma 's injury.

49. Malcolm Walter, J. Bauld, and Thomas Brock, "Siliceous Algal and Bacterial Stro-
matolites in Hot Spring and Geyser Effluents of Yellowstone National Park," Sci-
ence 178, 27 October 1972, 402-^05; see also M. Walter, "A Hot Spring Analog
for the Depositional Environment of Precambrian Iron Formations of the Lake Su-
perior Region," Economic Geology 67 (1972): 965-972. His doctoral dissertation
was entitled "Stromatolites and the Biostratigraphy of the Australian Precambrian"
(University of Adelaide, 1970).

50. Malcolm Walter, ed., Stromatolites (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1976).

51. Malcolm Walter, "What Do Stromatolites Tell Us, if Anything?" Paper delivered
at Gordon Research Conference on OOL, 23 February 1999, Ventura, Calif

52. Walter to Strick, personal communication, 23 February 1999.

53. The proceedings volume is Gregory R. Bock and Jamie A, Goode, eds., Evolution
of Hydrothermal Ecosystems on Earth (and Mars?) (New York: John Wiley, 1 996).
See also Walter's more popular treatment. The Search for Life on Mars (Cambridge,
Mass.: Perseus Books, 1999).

256 Notes to Pages 67-71

54. See Iris Fry, The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Over-
view (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), for a detailed and
philosophically astute discussion of this debate up to the present.

55. Freeman Dyson, Origins of Life, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999); John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary, The Origins of Life: from the Birth
of Life to the Origin of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

56. Arguing over a precise definition of "when life begins" has tended to be unhelp-
ful, as it has caused many investigators to overlook the dual-origin process as one
of the likely transitional stages. See John Farley, The Spontaneous Generation Con-
troversy from Descartes to Oparin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1977), 179-183; see also Harmke Kamminga, "The Problem of the Origin of Life
in the Context of Developments in Biology," Origins of Life and Evolution of the
Biosphere \% (\9U): 1-11.

57. Norman W. Pirie actually suggested a "dual" or "multiple origins" hypothesis at
least as far back as 1957, though analogy with Margulis's cell symbiosis argument
has certainly attracted much more attention to the idea. See Pirie, "Chemical Di-
versity and the Origins of Life," in Proceedings of the First International Sympo-
sium on the Origin of Life on the Earth, Moscow, 19-24 August 1957, ed. F. Clark
and R. L. M. Synge (New York: Pergamon Press, 1959), 76-83, esp. 78-79. See
also Carl Lindegren, The Cold War in Biology (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Planarian Press,
1966), 82.

58. Dyson, Origins of Life, 6-7.

59. Ibid., 7-8.

60. Ibid., 6.

61. See William Hagan, "Review of Fox's The Emergence of Life," Isis 80 (1989):
162-163; see also Andre Brack, "Review of Chemical Evolution: Physics of the
Origins and Evolution of Life," Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 29
(1999): 110.

62. See, e.g., Sidney Fox, "The Proteinoid Theory of the Origin of Life and Compet-
ing Ideas," ^menca« ^/o/ogyreac/ier 36 (1974): 161-172, 181.

63. Note that since the mid-1960s most researchers have preferred to use the plural,
origins of life, to emphasize their belief that the process may have occurred mul-
tiple times, or in multiple steps.

64. Maynard Smith and Szathmary, Ongwi o/Z,//e, 18-25.

65. Ibid, 12.

66. See, e.g., pp. 35 and 37, on which they say "catch-22 of the origin of life," but
they mean the origin of replication.

67. Evelyn Fox Keller's Refiguring Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995)
is one of several recent analyses that begin to examine this topic, as is Lily Kay's
Who Wrote the Book of Life? (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Donald Fleming also raised this issue in his classic paper "Emigre Physicists and
the Biological Revolution," in The Intellectual Migration, ed. Fleming and Bernard
Bailyn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969).

68. Maynard Smith and Szathmary, Origins of Life, 2.

69. Ibid., 12-13.

70. John Farley, Spontaneous Generation, 159-179. Equally important, but often his-
torically overlooked, is Charles B. Lipman, "The Origin of Life," Scientific Monthly

Notes to Pages 71-72 257

19 (October 1924): 357-367, a cogent statement of the heterotroph hypothesis, con-
temporaneous with Oparin and preceding Haldane.

71. Maynard Smith and Szathmary, Origins of Life, 36-37.

72. Leslie Orgel, "The Origin of Life: A Review of Facts and Speculations," Trends in
Biochemical Sciences li (1998): 491^95; see also Stephen Freeland, Robin Knight,
and Laura Landweber, "Do Proteins Predate DNA?" Science 286 (1999): 690-692;
Gerald F. Joyce, "The Rise and Fall of the RNA World," New Biologist 3 (1991):
399-407. This, along with many other critical papers in the field, are reprinted in
an invaluable collection, David Deamer and Gail Fleischaker, eds., Origins of Life:
The Central Concepts (Boston: Jones and Bartiett, 1994).

73. The field underwent a similar burst of growth following the Miller-Urey experi-
ment of 1953. But it was found that here, too, one of the most basic quandaries proved
more difficult than expected. This problem is discussed further in chapter 5.

74. Fox OHI, 9-10; see Young, "Prebiological Evolution: The Constructionist Approach
to the Origin of Life," in Molecular Evolution and Protobiology, ed. K. Matsuno
et al. (New York: Plenum, 1984), 45-54.

75. Miller to Horowitz, 14 June 1972, Horowitz papers 4.34. Oparin had criticized
Herrera's work in the 1957 edition of his Origin of Life on Earth, 3d ed. (Edinburgh:
Oliver and Boyd, 1957). For more on Herrera, see Fox, The Emergence of Life (New
York: Basic Books, 1988); see also Ismael Ledesma-Mateos and Ana Barahona,
"The Institutionalization of Biology in Mexico in the Early Twentieth Century: The
Conflict between Alfonso Luis Herrera and Isaac Ochoterena," Journal of the His-
tory of Biology 36 (2003): 285-307; Alicia Negron-Mendoza, "Alfonso L. Herrera:
A Mexican Pioneer in the Study of Chemical Evolution," Journal of Biological
Physics 20 (1994): 11-15.

76. Horowitz to Miller, 21 June 1972, Horowitz papers 4.34.

77. See Krishna Bahadur, "Photosynthesis of Amino Acids from Paraformaldehyde and
Potassium Nitrate," Nature 173, 12 June 1954, 1141; "The Reactions Involved in
the Formation of Compounds Preliminary to the Synthesis of Protoplasm and Other
Materials of Biological Importance," in Clark and Synge, Proceedings, 140-150;
Synthesis ofJeewanu: The Protocell (Allahabad, India: Ram Narain Lai Beni Prasad,
1966); Bahadur, S. Ranganayaki, and L. Santamaria, "Photosynthesis of Amino Ac-
ids from Paraformaldehyde Involving the Fixation of Nitrogen in the Presence of
Colloidal Molybdenum Oxide as Catalyst," Nature 182 (1958): 1668. Most recently,
see Bahadur and S. Ranganayaki, Origin of Life: A Functional Approach (Allahabad,
India: Ram Narain Lai Beni Prasad, 1981); Adolph E. Smith, Clair Folsome, and
Krishna Bahadur, "Nitrogenase Activity of Organo-Molybdenum Microstructures,"
Experientia 37 (1981): 357-359. Bahadur's work was severely criticized in Linda
Caren and Cyril Ponnamperuma, "A Review of Experiments on the Synthesis of
•Jeewanu,"' NASA Technical Memorandum X-1439, 1 September 1967. Unlike Fox,
he became persona non grata in the NASA exobiology network soon thereafter
(Sidney Fox OHI, 35-36; A. E. Smith to Strick, personal communication, 7 Febru-
ary 1993). My thanks to Dr. Adolph Smith, a sometime collaborator of Bahadur's,
for the loan of some Bahadur letters and a film of a Jeewanu preparation made in
1969.

78. See A. E. Smith and F. T. Bellware, "Dehydration and Rehydration in a Prebiologi-
cal System," Science 152, 15 April 1966, 362-363; Smith, Bellware, and J. J. Silver,

258 Notes to Pages 72-73

"Formation of Nucleic Acid Coacervates by Dehydration and Rehydration," Na-
ture 214, 3 June 1967, 1038-1040; Smith, Silver, and Gary Steinman, "Cell-like
Structures from Simple Molecules under Simulated Primitive Earth Conditions,"
Experientia 24, 15 January 1968, 36-38; see also Smith and Dean Kenyon, "Is Life
Originating De NovoT Perspectives in Biological Medicine 15 (August 1972): 529-
542. A good overall survey of the field during the late 1960s is Dean H. Kenyon
and Gary Steinman, Biochemical Predestination (New York: McGraw Hill, 1969).
Both Smith and Sol Kramer credited their interest in a "synthetic" approach to their
study of the work of Wilhelm Reich, e.g., The Bion Experiments on the Origin of
Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979).

79. See, e.g., Carl R. Woese, D. H. Dugre, W. C. Saxinger, and S. A. Dugre, "The Mo-
lecular Basis for the Genetic Code," PNAS 55 (1966): 966-974; Woese, The Ge-
netic Code: The Molecular Basis for Genetic Expression (New York: Harper and
Row, 1967). See also Leslie Orgel, "Evolution of the Genetic Apparatus," Jo«r«a/
of Molecular Biology 38 (1968): 381-393; Orgel, The Origins of Life: Molecules
and Natural Selection (New York: Wiley, 1973).

80. John Oro, "Synthesis of Adenine from Ammonium Cyanide," Biochemical and Bio-
physical Research Communications 2 (1960): 407-412; "Comets and the Forma-
tion of Biochemical Compounds on the Primitive Earth," Nature 190, 29 April 1961,
389-390; John Oro and A. R Kimball. "Synthesis of Purines under Possible Primi-
tive Earth Conditions, I. Adenine from Hydrogen Cyanide," Archives of Biochem-
istry and Biophysics 94 ( 1 96 1 ): 2 1 7-227; Oro and Kimball, "Synthesis of Purines
under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions, II. Purine Intermediates from Hydro-
gen Cyanide," Arch. Biochem. Biophysics 96 (1962): 293-313; Oro, "Stages and
Mechanisms of Prebiological Organic Synthesis," in The Origins of Prebiological
Svslems, ed. Sidney Fox (New York: Academic Press, 1965), 137-171; Oro, Stanley
Miller, Richard Young, and Cyril Ponnamperuma, eds., Cosmochemical Evolution
and the Origins of Life: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on
the Origins of Life and the First Meeting of ISSOL. Barcelona. June 25-28, 1973
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984), 2 vols. See also Juan Oro OHI.

81. Lynn Margulis, "Review of Cairns-Smith's The Life Puzzle," Origins of Life 4
(1973): 516.

82. A. Graham Cairns Smith. The Life Puzzle: On Crystals and Organisms and on the
Possibility of a Crystal as an Ancestor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972).

83. His first ideas are contained in "The Structure of the Primitive Gene and the Pros-
pect of Generating Life" (MS, dated October 1964); my thanks to Dr. Cairns-Smith
for a copy of this ms., which was submitted to (and rejected by) Nature then Sci-
ence and then sent to Melvin Calvin, who suggested that the author submit it to
the Journal of Theoretical Biology, which published a longer version. The first pub-
lished version was Cairns-Smith, "The Origin of Life and the Nature of the Primi-
tive Gene," Journal of Theoretical Biology 10 (1966); 53-88. As early as 29
February 1968, the theory received very favorable public notice in an article by
"gene-first" advocate C. H. Waddington, "That's Life," New York Review of Books,
19-22.

84. John Desmond Bernal, "The Physical Basis of Life," Proceedings of the Physics
Societv of London 62 (September 1949): 537-558; later revised and expanded as a
monograph (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951).

85. "The Case for an Alien Ancestry," Proceedings of the Royal Society (London) B

Notes to Pages 73-78 259

189, 6 May 1975, 249-272; Lovelock's paper was "Thermodynamics and the Rec-
ognition of Alien Biospheres," ibid., 167-181.

86. Cairns-Smith, Genetic Takeover and the Mineral Origins of Life (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1982).

87. Mella Paecht-Horowitz, J. Berger, and A. Katchalsky, "Prebiotic Synthesis of
Polypeptides by Heterogeneous Polycondensation of Amino Acid Adenylates,"
Nature 228, 14 November 1970, 636-639.

88. Hartman to Strick, personal communication, 3 February 2002.

89. The proceedings were published as Cairns-Smith and Hyman Hartman, eds., Clay
Minerals and the Origin of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

90. See, e.g., Cairns-Smith, "The First Organisms," Scientific American 252 (June
1985): 90-100; see also James Gleick, "Quiet Clay Revealed as Vibrant and Pri-
mal," New York Times, 5 May 1987, CI, 5; And, most recently, Cairns-Smith, "The
Origin of Life: Clays," in Frontiers of Life, ed. David Baltimore, Renato Dulbecco,
Francois Jacob, and Rita Levi-Montalcini (New York: Academic Press, 2001),
1:169-192.

91. DeVincenzi OHl, 4 February 1997, 36.

92. Oro OHI, 28 January 1997.

93. On the episode of "organized elements" in the Orgueil meteorite, see Steven Dick,
The Biological Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

94. Kvenvolden OHI.

95. Sidney Fox, Kaoru Harada, P Edgar Hare, G. Hinsch, and Georg Mueller, "Bio-
Organic Compounds and Glassy Microparticles in Lunar Fines and Other Materi-
als," Science 167, 30 January 1970, 1 61-110.

96. Gordon Hodgson, Edward Bunnenberg, Berthold Halpern, Etta Peterson, Keith
Kvenvolden, and Cyril Ponnamperuma, "Carbon Compounds in Lunar Fines from
Mare Tranquilitatis, II. Search for Porphyrins," Proceedings of the Apollo 11 Lu-
nar Science Conference 2 (1970): 1829-1844.

97. Kvenvolden OHI.

98. Harold Morowitz to Thomas Paine, June 1969, fid 5.2, Morowitz papers.

99. Harold Morowitz OHI.

100. Quoted in James Lawless, Clair Folsome, and Keith Kvenvolden, "Organic Matter
in Meteorites," Scientific American 226 (June 1972): 38^6.

101. Carleton Moore OHI.

102. Kvenvolden OHI, 6.

103. Katherine Pering to Strick, personal communication, 9 January 2002.

104. Kvenvolden OHI, 5-8; Keith Kvenvolden, James Lawless, Katherine Pering, Etta
Peterson, Jose Flores, Cyril Ponnamperuma, Ian R. Kaplan, and Carleton Moore,
"Evidence for Extraterrestrial Amino Acids and Hydrocarbons in the Murchison
Meteorite," Nature 228, 5 December 1970, 923-926. Kvenvolden 's story, with his
editorial supervision, was also told in Christopher Wills and Jeff Bada, The Spark
of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2000), 89-90.

105. Pering to Strick, personal communication, 9 January 2002; Ponnamperuma is dead,
and thus far no other participants have been located to interview with whom ac-
counts can be compared. Because the crucial encounter took place face to face
between Kvenvolden and Ponnamperuma with nobody else present, the point may
never be resolved with 100 percent certainty. Katherine Pering does not recall a conflict
about the results after the time of the hospital encounter; she does say professional

260 Notes to Pages 78-82

relations between the two men had been strained for a long time prior to this
episode.

106. Kvevolden OHI, 6.

107. See, e.g., John Cronin and Carleton B. Moore, "Amino Acid Analysis of the
Murchison, Murray, and Allende Carbonaceous Chondrites," Science 172, 25 June
1971, 1327-1329; Cronin, "Acid-Labile Amino Acid Precursors in the Murchison
Meteorite," Origins of Life 1 (October 1976): 337-342; Cronin, Sandra Pizzarello,
and Carleton B. Moore, "Amino Acids in an Antarctic Carbonaceous Chondrite,"
Science 206 (1979): 335-337.

108. Cronin and Pizzarello, "Enantiomeric Excesses in Meteoritic Amino Acids," Sci-
ence 275, 14 February 1997, 951-955.

109. A concise, up-to-date summary of knowledge in origin of life research is J. Will-
iam Schopf, ed.. Life's Origin: The Beginnings of Biological Evolution (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002). See also A. Lazcano, "The Never-Ending
Story," American Scientist 9\ (September-October 2003): 452^55.

Chapter 4 Vikings to Mars

1 . Richard S. Young, "The Origin and Evolution of the Viking Mission to Mars," Ori-
gins of Life 7 (July 1976): 271-272.

2. Norman Horowitz, To Utopia and Back: The Search for Life in the Solar System
(San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1986), 146.

3. See, e.g., Carl Sagan, "Life," Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. (London: 1974),
10:893-911.

4. In an interesting historical irony Sagan, like Horowitz, was proclaiming by the early
1980s that the fragility of life on Earth was one of the important lessons derived
from planetary exploration because of his work on the "nuclear winter" theory (see
chap. 5). Although he might never share Horowitz's hardboiled negativity about
the rarity of life, this represented a dramatic shift from Sagan 's deep basic opti-
mism up to this time, that life must be spread throughout the cosmos and must,
thus, be fairly tenacious.

5. MS, JPL Archives, Richard Davies papers, fid 5-1189.

6. See "Exobiology Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory" (MS, JPL, Pasadena,
Calif, 1972).

7. See Clayton R. Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program: A History of the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), chap.
8.

8. One of Lovelock's discoveries with the ECD was the rising concentration of chlo-
rofluorocarbons in the atmosphere, even far from population centers and industrial
areas. Thus, he made a seminal contribution to what soon became the ozone deple-
tion debates of the 1970s (about spray can propellants as well as supersonic trans-
port planes). See Lydia Dotto and Harold Schiff, The Ozone War (New York:
Doubleday, 1978); see also Lovelock, "The Independent Practice of Science," New
Scientist 83, 6 September 1979, 716-717.

9. Silverstein to Lovelock, 9 May 1961, Lovelock papers. My thanks to Dr. Lovelock
for giving me access to this material.

10. NASA, Sixth Semiannual Report to Congress, 1 July-31 December 1961 (Wash-
ington, D.C.: NASA, 1962), 181.

Notes to Pages 82-85 261

11. James Lovelock, Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist (London:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 137-145, 227-264.

12. Carl Bruch, "Instrumentation for the Detection of Extraterrestrial Life," in Biol-
ogy and the Exploration of Mars, ed. C. S. Pittendrigh et al. (Washington, D.C.:
NAS, 1966), 488-489.

13. Ibid., 142-145.

14. James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979), 1. Stapledon had enormous influence on several generations of ori-
gin of life and exobiology researchers, most notably J. B. S. Haldane. See Mark B.
Adams, "Last Judgment: The Visionary Biology of J. B. S. Haldane," Journal of
the History of Biology 33 (2000): 457^91.

15. For a survey of the strategies being considered at this time, see Bruch, "Instrumen-
tation."

16. It is worth noting that this basic insight of Lovelock's, seen as so challenging in
1965, has since become the new paradigm in exobiology and astrobiology. See,
e.g., Pamela Conrad and Kenneth Nealson (both at JPL), "A Non-Earthcentric Ap-
proach to Life Detection," Astrobiology 1 (2001 ): 15-24; see also Stephen Schneider,
"A Goddess of Earth or the Imagination of a Man?" Science 29 1 , 9 March 200 1 ,
1906-1907, a well-balanced assessment of Lovelock's fundamental contributions.

17. Edward C. Ezell and Linda N. Ezell, On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet, 1958-
1978. NASA-SP 4212 (Washington, DC: NASA, 1984), 107.

18. James Lovelock, "A Physical Basis for Life-Detection Experiments," Nature 207,
7August 1965, 568-570.

19. Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, 237-239.

20. Dian R. Hitchcock and James E. Lovelock. "Life Detection by Atmospheric Analy-
sis,"/carws 7 (1967): 149-159.

21. J. E. Lovelock and C. E. Giflfin, "Planetary Atmospheres: Compositional and Other
Changes Associated with the Presence of Life," in Advanced Space Experiments,
vol. 25, ed. O. L. Tiffany and E. Zaitzeff (Washington, D.C.: American Astronauti-
cal Society, 1968), 179-193.

22. Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, 239; Lovelock OHI; see also Horowitz to Orgel, 3 Feb-
ruary 1968, Horowitz papers 5.10.

23. Lovelock OHI; see also Gaia, 10.

24. MargulisOHl.

25. J. E. Lovelock, "Geophysiology: A New Look at Earth Science," Bulletin of the
American Meteorological Society 67 (April 1986): 392.

26. Robert J. Charlson, James Lovelock, Meinrat Andreae, and Stephen Warren, "Oce-
anic Phytoplankton, Atmospheric Sulphur, Cloud Albedo and Climate," Nature 326,
16 April 1987,655-661.

27. It was so much the norm that a psychiatrist (Frank Fremont-Smith) and an etholo-
gist (Sol Kramer) were reinvited (having been at the 1 967 meeting as well), and
there was much talk of the origin of life being an epistemological problem as much
as a scientific one, invoking Marshall McLuhan's slogan that "the medium is the
message." Kramer described first getting interested in the origin of life problem
while enrolled in a course on cancer, taught by famed psychoanalyst turned natu-
ral scientist Wilhelm Reich. See Lynn Margulis, ed.. Origins of Life II (New York:
Gordon and Breach, 1970), 8-13.

28. Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, 239; see also Horowitz, R. P. Sharp, and R. W. Davies,

262 Notes to Pages 85-88

"Planetary Contamination I: Tlie Problem and the Agreements," Science 155, 24
March 1967, 1501-1505. Horowitz was opposed in this opinion by Carl Sagan,
Elliott Levinthal, and Joshua Lederberg, "Contamination of Mars," Science 1 59,
15 March 1968, 1 191-1 196; see also Sagan OHI.

29 . Lovelock, "Independent Practice," 715.

30. Lyndon B. Johnson, "Remarks upon Viewing New Mariner 4 Pictures from Mars,"
29 July 1965, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 806; cited in
Howard McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 122.

3 1 Steven D. Kilston, Robert R. Drummond, and Carl Sagan, "A Search for Life on
Earth at Kilometer Resolution," Icarus 5, (January 1966): 79-98. Interestingly, when
the Galileo spacecraft tested out this proposition by observing Earth in 1993, Sagan
was proved wrong. He admitted as much in "A Search for Life on Earth from the
Galileo Spacecraft," Nature 365 (1993): 715-721.

32. Horowitz to Strick, personal communication, 16 January 2002.

33. Henry S. R Cooper, The Search for Life on Mars (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1980), 69.

34. For an excellent description of these Antarctic Dry Valleys, see Stephen Pyne, The
Ice: A Journey to Antarctica (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 226-233,
312-316. In a stunning stroke of historical irony, these valleys make a spectacular
reappearance in the exobiology story after Viking, as a source of meteorites, some
later determined to be from Mars, most notably EETA79001 from Elephant Mo-
raine and ALH84001 from the Allan Hills (see chap. 8).

35. Norman Horowitz, Roy E. Cameron, and Jerry S. Hubbard. "Microbiology of the
Dry Valleys of Antarctica," Science 176, 21 April 1972, 242-245; see also Roy E.
Cameron, "Properties of Desert Soils," in Pittendrigh et al.. Biology, 164—186; and
Ezells, On Mars. 235-237, including errata sheet.

36. See 1 May 1966, JPL press release "Can Exploration of a Chilean Desert Assist in
the Search for Life on Mars?" "JPL scientists Richard Davies, Roy E. Cameron,
and Roy Brereton will leave 2 May on a six-week exploration trip in Chile's Atacama
Desert." NASA History Office, Exobiology files.

37. Ezells, On Mars, 235-237; Levin to Horowitz, letter, 27 June 1972, Horowitz pa-
pers, 4.18.

38. Brock to Strick, personal communication, 5 February 1999.

39. Cooper, Life on Mars. 65-69, 71-80. Brown University geologist Tim Mutch was
the head of the Viking lander imaging team; he and Sagan conducted tests on a
lander model in the Colorado desert, to determine the camera's capabilities.

40. Carl Sagan, "Life," in Encyclopedia Britannica. Sagan 's interest in definitions and
terminology in the discussion was also reflected in an exchange he had with Dean
Kenyon and N. W. Pirie in the journal Origins of Life; see Sagan, "On the Terms
'Biogenesis' and 'Abiogenesis,'" Origins of Life, 5 (October 1974): 529.

41. N. H. Horowitz, "The Search for Extraterrestrial Life," Science 151, 18 February
1966, 790.

42. Frank Herbert, Dune (New York: Ace Books, 1 965).

43. Horowitz, "Search," 789.

44. Ibid., 790.

45. Ibid., 792.

Notes to Pages 88-93 263

46. On the earlier history of Gulliver, see Gilbert Levin, A. H. Heim, J. R. Clendenning,
and M. F. Thompson, "Gulliver: A Quest for Life on Mars," Science 138, 12 Octo-
ber 1962, 1 14-119; see also Gilbert Levin, A. H. Heim, M. F. Thompson, D. R.
Beem, and N. H. Horowitz, "'Gulliver': An Experiment for Extraterrestrial Life
Detection and Analysis," in Life Sciences and Space Research, ed. M. Florkin and
A. DoUfus, 2(1964): 124-132.

47. Cooper, Life on Mars, 100.

48. Ibid.

49. Cooper, Life on Mars, 94.

50. Horowitz to Lederberg, 4 December 1973, Horowitz papers 4.3.

5 1 . Harold P. Klein, A Personal History (Mountain View, Calif: privately printed, 1 998),
203; see also 202-3, 218, 269-282, 287-292, on Klein's experience with the Biol-
ogy team throughout the mission. On the Biology Committee, see also Cooper, Life
on Mars, 94-106; and Ezells, On Mars, 229-242.

52. Klaus Biemann, "Detection and Identification of Biologically Significant Com-
pounds by Mass Spectrometry," in Life Sciences and Space Research, ed. M. Florkin,
3 (1965): 77-85. See Helge Kragh, "The Chemistry of the Universe: Historical
Roots of Modem Cosmochemistry," .4n«a/5 of Science 57 (2000): 353-368.

53. Klaus Biemann, Juan Oro, Priestly Toulmin III, Leslie Orgel, A. O. Nier, D. M.
Anderson, P. G. Simmonds, D. Flory, A. V Diaz, D. R. Rushneck, J. E. Biller, and
Arthur K. LaFleur. "The Search for Organic Substances and Inorganic Volatile Com-
pounds in the Surface of Mars," Journal of Geophysical Research 82, 30 Septem-
ber 1 977, 464 1 . Note that this is their construction of their reasoning after the data
have come in, in a way that took everyone by surprise.

54. Jerry Hubbard, James P. Hardy, and N. H. Horowitz, "Photocatalytic Production of
Organic Compounds from CO and HjO in a Simulated Martian Atmosphere," PNAS
68 (March 1971): 574-578.

55. Horowitz to Miller, 21 June 1972, Horowitz papers 4.34. This work was published
as Jerry Hubbard, J. R Hardy, G. E. Voecks, and Ellis E. Golub, "Photocatalytic
Synthesis of Organic Compounds from CO and Water: Involvement of Surfaces in
the Formation and Stabilization of Products," Journal of Molecular Evolution 2
(1973): 149-166.

56. Horowitz to Orgel, 10 April 1974, Horowitz papers 5.10. On the general state of
the mission planning by the summer of 1972, see Richard S. Young, "The Begin-
ning of Comparative Planetology," lecture to August 1972 Special Symposium on
Photochemistry and the Origin of Life, Origins of Life 4 (Summer 1973): 505-
515. On the biology package, see Harold R Klein, Joshua Lederberg, and Alex Rich,
"Biological Experiments: The Viking Mars Lander," Icarus 16 (1972): 139-146;
Gilbert V Levin, "Detection of Metabolically Produced Labeled Gas: The Viking
Mars Lander," Icarus 16 (1972): 153-166. In the same issue of Icarus, on the
GCMS experiment, see D. M. Anderson et al., "Mass Spectrometric Analysis of
Organic Compounds, Water, and Volatile Constituents in the Atmosphere and Sur-
face of Mars," Icarus 16 (1972): 1 1 1-138.

57. Ezells, On Mars, 231.

58. Ibid., 229.

59. Ibid., 232.

60. Ibid. (By October 1 972 Lederberg wrote to NASA administrator John Naugle about

264 Notes to Pages 93-95

future Mars missions, already imagining that budget constraints could postpone the
next one until 1979; Lederberg papers. The next Mars mission was not until the
Mars Pathfinder, which landed on 4 July 1997.)

61. Ezells, On Mara, 232.

62. Ibid., 233; see also Klein autobiography, 270; and Lederberg to Richard Young, 15
March 1972, Lederberg papers.

63. Ezells, On Mars. 234-235.

64. Friedmann (at Florida State University from 1968 to 2001) first met Vishniac at
the annual American Society for Microbiology meeting in 1973; the first samples
were brought back after Vishniac's death, given to Friedmann by his widow, Helen.
Since that time Friedmann himself became much more active in Antarctic research,
in some ways picking up in Vishniac's stead. See Antarctic Cryptoendolithic Mi-
crobial Ecosystem (ACME) Research Group Newsletter, no. 8 (May 1986), wherein
all of Friedmann s correspondence with Vishniac and Helen Vishniac is reproduced.

65. Lederberg was apparently one of the first to get the news of Vishniac's death; see
Lederberg to VanNiel, 12 December 1973, Lederberg papers.

66. Friedmann to Strick. personal communication, 27 May 2002.

67. Chris McKay, "Relevance of Antarctic Microbial Ecosystems to Exobiology," in
Antarctic Microhiohgy. ed. E. Imre Friedmann (New York: Wiley-Liss, 1993), 593-
601; see also McKay. "The Search for Life on Mars," Origins of Life and Evolu-
tion of the Biosphere 27 (1997): 273-275.

68. Friedmann to Strick, personal communication, 27 May 2002. He explained: "I have
been supported by different NSF programs (e.g. Systematic Biology) and the fol-
lowing remarks refer only to my experience with DPP (Division of Polar Programs),
later OPP (Office of Polar Programs). In contrast to other NSF programs, the 'man-
agers' of Polar Programs are not professors serving for a limited number of years
in a temporary position, but permanent federal employees. In this, they are similar
to NASA program directors. But the same system produced, in the two agencies,
quite different 'cultures.'"

69. Harold R Klein, Joshua Lederberg, Alex Rich, Norman Horowitz, Vance Oyama,
and Gilbert Levin "The Viking Mission Search for Life on Mars," Nature 262, (July
1976): 24-27.

70. Richard S. Young, "The Origin and Evolution of the Viking Mission to Mars," Ori-
gins of Life 1 (July 1976): 271-272.

71. Harold P. Klein, "General Constraints on the Viking Biology Investigation," Ori-
gins of Life 1 (July 1976): 273-279. At this time Klein wrote numerous general
information articles on the biology experiments, including "Life on Mars?" Trends
in Biochemical Sciences 1 (1976): 174-176; and "Microbiology on Mars?" ASM
[American Society for Microbiology] News 42 (April 1976): 207-214.

72. Gilbert Levin and Patricia A. Straat, "Labeled Release: An Experiment in
Radiorespirometry," Origins of Life 7 (July 1976): 293-31 1.

73. Jerry S. Hubbard, "The Pyrolytic Release Experiment: Measurement of Carbon As-
similation," Origins of Life 1 (July 1976): 281-292.

74. Vance Oyama, Bonnie J. Berdahl, G. C. Carle, M. E. Lehwalt, and H. S. Ginoza,
"The Search for Life on Mars: Viking 1976 Gas Changes as Indicators of Biologi-
cal Activity," Origins of Life 1 (July 1976): 313-333.

75. These included (before the mission) Icarus 16 (1972) and Origins of Life 5 (1974);
then, reporting of the "preliminary results" in the 17 December 1976 issue of Sci-

Notes to Pages 95-99 265

ence; definitive descriptions of the experiment and the data set in the 30 Septem-
ber 1977 issue of Journal of Geophysical Research; a further discussion of the am-
biguous biology package results in a special issue of Origins of Life (9) and of Icarus
(34), both in 1978; and "completion" of the experiments (compared with simula-
tions of them run in Earth labs trying to duplicate the Mars results) reported in
Journal of Molecular Evolution 14 (1979).

76. Ezells, On Mars, 384. For accounts that capture a more popular sense of the mis-
sion, see Timothy Ferris, "The Odyssey and the Ecstasy," Rolling Stone, 1 April
1977; Anon., "One Man's Mars, No Martians," Science News 111,5 March 1977,
149; David L. Chandler, "Life on Mars," Atlantic 242 (June 1977): 34-^9; see also,
and with more scientific content, Norman Horowitz, "The Search for Life on Mars,"
Scientific American 237 (November 1977): 57-68.

77. Benton Clark et al., "Inorganic Analyses of Martian Surface Samples at the Viking
Landing Sites," Science 194, 17 December 1976, 1283-1288.

78. McKay, "Search for Life," 264.

79. Ezells, On Mars, 403.

80. Harold P. Klein, "Did Viking Discover Life on Mars?" Origins of Life and Evolu-
tion of the Biosphere 29 (1999): 628.

81. Ibid.

82. Gilbert V Levin and Patricia A. Straat, "Viking Labeled Release Biology Experi-
ment: Interim Results," Science 194, 17 December 1976, 1322-1329; see also, with
all the additional control experiments over many months reported. Levin and Straat,
"Recent Results from the Viking Labeled Release Experiment on Mars," Journal
of Geophysical Research 82, 30 September 1977, 4663^667.

83. Levin OHI; Ezells, On Mars, 403; see also Levin, "The Issue of Life on Mars and
Its Implications on Science and Philosophy," talk at Philosophical Society of
Washington, Cosmos Club, 9 February 2001, Washington, D.C.

84. Horowitz in 7 August 1976 Viking press conference at JPL, quoted in Ezells, On
Mars, 405.

85. Ibid., 407.

86. Biemann et al., "Search." Carl Sagan was among those floored by the GCMS
results: "That really knocked me for a loop," he said (Sagan OHI, 5).

87. Ezells, 0« A/aro, 408.

88. McKay, "Search," 264.

89. Oro OHI, 4-6; Levin OHI, 5-8.

90. Ibid.

91. Oro OHI, 5.

92. Ibid.; see also Oro and G. Holzer, Journal of Molecular Evoltion 14 (1979): 153-
160.

93. Ponnamperuma, A. Shimoyama, M. Yamada, T. Hobo, and R. Pal, Science 197
(1977): 455^61.

94. Oyama, Bonnie Berdahl, Fritz Woeller, and M. E. Lehwalt. "The Chemical Activi-
ties of the Viking Biology Experiments and the Arguments for the Presence of
Superoxide, Peroxides, YFe203, and CarbonSuboxide Polymer in Martian Soil," in
COSPAR Life Sciences and Space Research, ed. R. Holmquist and A. C. Strickland,
16 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1978), 3-8.

95. Levin OHL

96. Ibid.

266 Notes to Pages 100-106

97. See, e.g., every paper other than Levin and Straat's in the special issue oi Journal
of Molecular Evolution in which all the experiments were summed up and described
as "concluded," including Harold P. Klein, "Simulation of Viking Biology Experi-
ments: An Overview," Journal of Molecular Evolution 14(1979); 1 6 1 - 1 65 ; see also
Oro and Holzer, 153-160.

98. Levin and Straat, "Reappraisal of Life on Mars," in Reiber, NASA Mars Conference,
187-192.

99. Levin OHI, 40.

100. Sagan OHI; Levin OHI.

101. Barry DiGregorio, Mars: The Living Planet (Berkeley, Calif: Frog, Ltd., 1997).

102. Harold R Klein, "Did Viking Discover Life on Mars?" Origins of Life and Evolu-
tion of the Biosphere 29 (1999): 625-631; see also Klein to Strick, personal com-
munication, 22 February 2000; Klein OHI, 28 November 2000.

103. Klein, "Did Viking Discover Life," 630.

104. Ibid., 627-629.

105. Ibid., 629.

106. Ibid., 630.

107. Sagan OHI, 7-8; the paper referred to is Joshua Lederberg and Carl Sagan, "Mi-
croenvironments for Life on Mars," PNAS 48, 15 September 1962, 1473-1475.

108. Dana Hedgpeth, "The Man Who Wants to Return to Mars," Washington Post, 1
December 2000, Al, 10-11.

109. Steven Banner, Kevin Devine, Lidia Matveeva, and David Powell, "The Missing
Organic Molecules on Mars," PNAS 91, 14 March 2000, 2425-2430.

Chapter 5 The Post-Viking Revolutions

1 . Iris Fry, The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview (New
Brunswick, N.J.; Rutgers University Press, 2000), 112-113. For a survey of this
creationist literature, see Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley, and R. L. Olsen,
The Mystery of Life's Origin (1984; rpt., Dallas, Tex.: Lewis and Stanley, 1992);
Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, Of Pandas and People: The Central Question
of Biological Origins, 2d ed. (Dallas, Tex.: Haughton, 1993); see also 1994 video
interviews with Charles Thaxton and Dean H. Kenyon, available from Access Re-
search Network, Colorado Springs, Colo., <http://www.arn.org>.

2. The beginning stages of much of this ferment and reconceptualization process
can be seen in the volume by the Space Smdies Board, National Research Coun-
cil /National Academy of Sciences, The Search for Life s Origins: Progress and Fu-
ture Directions in Planetary Biology and Chemical Evolution (Washington, D.C.:.
NAS Press, 1990). One of the authors of this volume, Hyman Hartman, has said
that origin of life work seemed to fall into strikingly different pre-Viking and post-
K;Vt/«g phases. Hartman to Strick, personal communication, 3 February 2002.

3. See William K. Hartmann and Donald R. Davis. "Satellite-Sized Planetesimals and
Lunar Origin," Icarus 24 (1975): 504-515; see also Donald Wilhelms, To a Rocky
Moon (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 353.

4. See Stephen Jay Gould, "Toward the Vindication of Punctuational Change," in
Catastrophes and Earth History: The New Uniformitarianism, ed. W. A. Berggren
and J. A. Van Couvering (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 9-34.
Gould had also been making such arguments in his influential and widely read

Notes to Pages 106-109 267

monthly column "This View of Life" in Natural History since 1975. See also
Stephen Brush, Fruitful Encounters (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1996); and William Broad, "Apollo Opened Window on Moon's Violent Birth," New
York Times. 20 July 1999, Fl-2.

5. See, e.g., John B. Corliss and R. D. Ballard, "Oases of Life in the Cold Abyss,"
National Geographic 152 (October 1977): 441^53; Holger Jannasch and C. O.
Wirsen, "Microbial Life in the Deep Sea," Scientific American 236 (1977): 42-52.

6. See, e.g., John B. Corliss et al., "Submarine Thermal Springs on the Galapagos
Rift," Science 203, 16 March 1979, 1073-1083; see also Holger Jannasch and M.
J. Mottl, "Geomicrobiology of Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents," Science 229, 23 Au-
gust 1985, 717-725. For Jannasch's reminiscences, see "Adventures Discovering
Microbes Changing the Planet," in Many Faces, Many Microbes, ed. Ronald M.
Atlas (Washington, D.C.: American Society of Microbiology Press, 2000), 71-76;
see also "Small Is Powerful: Recollections of a Microbiologist and Oceanographer,"
Annual Reviews of Microbiology 5\ (1997): 1^5.

7. Woese, "Bacterial Evolution," Microbiology Review 51 (1987): 221-271; Woese,
O. Kandler, and M. L. Wheelis, "Towards a Natural System of Organisms: Pro-
posal for the Domains Archaea, Bacteria, and Eucarya," Proceedings of the Na-
tional Academy ofSciences{PNAS) 87 (1990): 4576-4579.

8. Woese, "The Universal Ancestor," PNAS 95, 9 June 1998, 6854-6859.

9. See, e.g., Virgina Morrell, "Microbiology's Scarred Revolutionary," Science 276,
2 May 1997, 699-702; Woese to Stride, personal communication, 10 June 1997;
see also Woese, "There Must Be a Prokaryote Somewhere: Microbiology's Search
for Itself," Microbiology Reviews 58 (March 1994): 1-9; see also Sherrie Lyons,
"Thomas Kuhn Is Alive and Well," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45 (Sum-
mer 2002): 359-376. Lyons describes Radhey Gupta's alternative "monoderm/
diderm" classification, which shows that alternative schemas to Woese's are also
possible, outside the previous prokayote/eukaryote "paradigm."

10. See, e.g., Joseph Fruton, Eighty Years (New Haven, Conn.: Epikouros Press, 1994),
146-149; by 1960 Pollard, thoroughly miffed at Yale, had relocated to Penn State.
My thanks to Nicolas Rasmussen for this reference.

11. MacNab to Strick, personal communication, 25 May 1982; see also J. E. Strick,
"Swimming against the Tide: Adrianus Pijper and the Debate over Bacterial Fla-
gella, 1946-1956," Aw 87 (June 1996): 274-305.

12. Woese to Strick, personal communication, 20 December 2001.

13. Ernst Mayr, "Two Empires or Three?" PNAS 95 (1998): 9720-9723; see also
Woese's reply, "Default Taxonomy: Ernst Mayr's View of the Microbial World,"
PNAS 95 (1998): 1 1043-1 1046. See Jan Sapp, Genesis: The Evolution of Biology
(London: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 18.

14. MargulisOHI.

15. See Benton Clark, "Sulftir: The Fountainhead of Life in the Universe?" in Life in
the Universe, ed. John Billingham (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981). See also
John B. Corliss, John Baross, and S. E. Hoffman, "An Hypothesis Concerning the
Relationship between Submarine Hot Springs and the Origin of Life," Oceanologica
Acta, No. Sp. (1981): 59-69; see also John A. Baross, and S. E. Hoffman. "Sub-
marine Hydrothermal Vents and Associated Gradient Environments as Sites for the
Origin of Life," Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 15 (1985): 327-
345. For the general recognition that the temperature at which life could survive

268 Notes to Pages 109-110

was higher than anyone had thought, see Thomas Brock, "Life at High Tempera-
tures," Science 230, 11 October 1985, 132-138.

16. See, e.g., a special issue of the journal Cell in June 1996, including Patrick Forterre,
"A Hot Topic: The Origin of Hyperthermophiles," Cell 85, 14 June 1996, 789-792;
see also Antonio Lazcano and Stanley Miller, "The Origin and Early Evolution of
Life: Prebiotic Chemistry, the Pre-RNA World, and Time," ibid., 793-798.

1 7. Sarah Simpson, "Life's First Scalding Steps," Science News 155,9 January 1 999, 24-
26; see also M. Baiter, "Did Life Begin in Hot Water?" Science 280, 3 April 1998,
31.

1 8. William W. Rubey "Geologic History of Sea Water," Geological Society of America
Bulletin 62 (September 1951), 1111-1147; see also idem., "Development of the
Hydrosphere and Atmosphere, with Special Reference to Probable Composition of
the Early Atmosphere," Geological Society Special Paper 62 (1955): 63 1-650.

19. Cronin to Strick, personal communication, 20 December 200 1 . The papers referred
to are: T C. Chamberlin and R. T. Chamberlin, "Early Terrestrial Conditions That
May Have Favored Organic Synthesis," Science 28, 25 December 1908, 897-91 1,
reprinted in Deamer and Fleischaker, Origins, 15-29; Harrison Brown, "Rare Gases
and the Form of the Earth's Atmosphere," in The Atmospheres of the Earth and the
Planets, ed. G. R Kuiper (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); Hans Suess,
"Die Haufigkeit der Edelgase auf der Erde und im Kosmos," Journal of Geology
57 (1949): 600-607; Heinrich D. Holland, "Model for the Evolution of the Earth's
Atmosphere," in Petrologic Studies: A Volume to Honor A. F. Buddington (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Geological Society of America, 1962), 447-477, reprinted in
Geochemistry and the Origin of Life, ed. Keith Kvenvolden (Stroudsburg, Pa.:
Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, 1974), 210-240.

20. Kasting to Strick, personal communication, 21 December 2001 . Walker's book is
The Evolution of the Atmosphere (New York: Macmillan, 1977); Brack's book is
The Molecular Origins of Life (New York: Academic Press, 1998). A good review
article (except for the caveats in the quoted passage) is James Kasting, "Earth's
Early Atmosphere," Science 259, 12 February 1993, 920-926.

21. Philip Abelson, "Chemical Events on the Primitive Earth," PNAS 55, 15 June 1966,
1365-1372, reprinted in Kvenvolden, Geochemistry and the Origin of Life, 48-55.
Rubey and Abelson are discussed in Horowitz to Miller, 6 December 1973
(Horowitz papers, 4.34).

22. Richard Kerr, "Origin of Life: New Ingredients Suggested," Science 210, 3 Octo-
ber 1980, 42^3.

23. Stanley Tyler and Elso Barghoorn, "Occurrence of Structurally Preserved Plants
in Pre-Cambrian Rocks of the Canadian Shield," Science 1 19, 30 April 1954, 606-
608.

24. Elso Barghoorn and Stanley Tyler, "Microorganisms from the Gunflint Chert," Sci-
ence 147 (February 1965): 563-577; Preston Cloud, "Significance of the Gunflint
(Precambrian) Microflora," Science 148, 2 April 1965, 27-35; Elso Barghoorn and
J. William Schopf, "Microorganisms Three Billion Years Old from the Precambrian
of South Africa," Science 152 (1966): 758-763; Elso Barghoorn and J. W Schopf,
"Alga-like Fossils from the Early Precambrian of South Africa," Science 156(1 967):
508-512. For the inside story on many of these discoveries and of how tensions
over priority were negotiated between Barghoorn and Cloud in 1965, see J. Wil-

Notes to Pages 110-116 269

Ham Schopf, Cradle of Life: The Discovery of Earth s Earliest Fossils (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 56-61.

25. Schopf to Strick, personal communication, 5 May 2002. Barghoom and Schopf both
attended the 1967 NASA/Smithsonian OOL meeting in Princeton. It may be there
that they first made the contacts leading to their first (1967-1969) Exobiology grant.

26. A. H. Knoll and E. S. Barghoom, "Archean Microfossils Showing Cell Division
from the Swaziland System of South Africa," Science 198 (1977): 396-398.

27. Stephen Jay Gould, "An Early Start," Natural History 87 (February 1978): 10-24,
reprinted in The Panda s Thumb (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 217-226. Quote
from that edition, 22 1 .

28. Schwartz to Strick, personal communication, 3 February 2002.

29. George Wald, "The Origin of Life," Scientific American 192 (August 1954): 44-53.

30. Antonio Lazcano and Stanley Miller, "How Long Did It Take for Life to Begin
and Evolve to Cyanobacteria?" Journal of Molecular Evolution 39 (1994): 546-
554.

31. J. William Schopf, ed.. Earth s Earliest Biosphere: Its Origin and Evolution (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), xxi.

32. Ibid.

33. J. W. Schopf and Cornelis Klein, eds.. The Proterozoic Biosphere (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992).

34. J. William Schopf, "Microfossils of the Early Archean Apex Chert: New Evidence
of the Antiquity of Life," Science 260, 30 April 1993, 640-646.

35. Schopf to Strick, personal communication, 5 May 2002.

36. Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada, The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval
Soup (New York: Perseus, 2000), 198.

37. The proceedings were published as John Billingham, ed.. Life in the Universe (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).

38. Stephen Schneider and Randi Londer, The CoEvolution of Climate and Life (San
Francisco: Sierra Club, 1984).

39. The proceedings of this conference were published as Stephen Schneider and
Penelope Boston, eds.. Scientists on Gala (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).

40. David Milne, David Raup, John Billingham, Karl Niklas, and Kevin Padian, eds..
The Evolution of Complex and Higher Organisms (ECHO), NASA SP-478 (Moffet
Field, Calif: NASA Ames, 1985), 24.

41 . See Robert M. Young, "Darwin's Metaphor: Does Nature Select?" Darwin s Meta-
phor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 79-125.

42. The first sharp critique in this vein was W. Ford Doolittle, "Is Nature Really Moth-
erly?" CoEvolution Quarterly (Spring 1981): 58-63, with replies by Lovelock (62-
63) and Margulis (63-65); then came Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker
(1984). Quite a bit of the criticism is summed up in Charles Mann, "Lynn Margulis:
Science's Unruly Earth Mother," Science 252, 19 April 1991, 378-381. The tone
used by critics is rather more harsh and dismissive than is typical for a scholarly
scientific exchange.

43 . The book was Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1979).

44. James Lovelock and A. J. Watson. "The Regulation of Carbon Dioxide and Cli-
mate: Gaia or Geochemistry," Planetary and Space Sciences 30 (1982): 795-802;

2 70 Notes to Pages 116-120

see also A. J. Watson and J. E. Lovelock, "Biological Homeostasis of the Global
Environment: The Parable of Daisyworld," Tellus 35B (1983); 284-289. For a bal-
anced retrospective on the entire controversy, see Stephen Schneider, "A Goddess
of Earth or the Imagination of a Man?" Science 291, 9 March 2001, 1906-1907.

45. Milne et al., £C//a 154.

46. See, e.g., Wills and Bada, Spark, 81-83, for the initial negative reaction of scien-
tists to Gaia based on its "Earth Mother" aspects and for Lovelock's response.

47. See, e.g., Pamela Conrad and Kenneth Nealson (both currently at JPL), "A Non-
Earthcentric Approach to Life Detection," Astrobiology 1 (2001): 15-24. Nealson
has also written an excellent review of new discoveries and changed thinking in
microbiology since Viking which are relevant to exobiology and astrobiology: "Post-
Viking Microbiology: New Approaches, New Data, New Insights," Origins of Life
and Evolution of the Biosphere 29 (1999): 73-93.

48. Morowitz, Beginnings of Cellular Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992),
5-6. For Morowitz the "systems approach" of Gaia must have had inherent appeal
early on.

49. James Lovelock, "A Way of Life for Agnostics?" Skeptical Inquirer 25 (Septem-
ber-October 2001): 40-42; Lovelock OHI. Margulis has replied in numerous
articles, several of them in her recent collection with Dorion Sagan, Slanted Truths
(New York: Springer Verlag, 1997); see esp. "Big Trouble in Biology," 265-282.

50. Lovelock to Strick, personal communication, 1 1 March 2002. See Midgeley, Sci-
ence and Poetry (London: Routledge, 2002).

51. See Lovelock, "On Being an Independent Scientist," New Scientist, 6 September
1979, 1\A-1\1; Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, 2d ed. (New York: W. W. Norton,
1995), xvi-xvii; he develops the discussion much further as the central focus of
his autobiography. Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000).

52. Lovelock to Strick, personal communication, 10 June 2002. The article he men-
tions is Timothy Lenton, "Gaia and Natural Selection," Nature 394 (1998): 439-
447. The Lawton article is "Earth System Science," Science 292, 15 June 2001,
1965-1966. Lovelock's Geophysiology of Amazonia paper was republished as "Geo-
physiology: A New Look at Earth Science," Bulletin of the American Meteorologi-
cal Society 67 (April 1986): 392-397.

53. Lawton, "Earth System," 1965.

54. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1970).

55. Lovelock to Strick, personal communication, 6 June 2002. The article to which he
refers is Dennis Overbye, "NASA Presses Its Search for Extraterrestrial Life," New
York Times, 4 June 2002, Dl, 4, specifically to a quote about Gaia by Kevin Zahnle.

56. See Luis W. Alvarez, Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (New York: Basic Books,
1987), chap. 15.

57. Luis W. Alvarez, Walter Alvarez, Frank Asaro, and Helen V Michel, "Extraterrestrial
Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction," Science 208, 6 June 1980, 1095-
1108.

58. DeVincenzi OHI, 28 January 1997.

59. David M. Raup and Joseph J. Sepkoski Jr., "Mass Extinctions in the Marine Fossil
Record," 5c;e«ce 215 (March 1982): 1501-1503.

60. Milne, et al., ECHO, xix.

Notes to Pages 120-127 271

61 . D. Raup and J. J. Sepkoski, "Periodicity of Extinctions in the Geologic Past," PNAS
81, 1 February 1984, 801-805.

62. Ibid.

63. Raup to Strick, personal communication, 18 March 2002; DeVincenzi OHI, 28 Janu-
ary 1997.

64. Ibid.

65. Richard Kerr, "Periodic Impacts and Extinctions Reported," Science 223, 23 March
1984, 1277.

66. Ibid.; see also Alvarez, Alvarez, 265-267.

67. Alvarez, Alvarez, 266-267.

68. Raup to Strick, personal communication, 8 May 2002; see also David Raup, "Peri-
odicity of Extinction: A Review," in Controversies in Modern Geology, ed. D. W.
MuUer et al. (New York: Academic Press, 1991), 193-208.

69. Alvarez, Alvarez, 282-283.

70. William Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos (New York: Holt, 1999),
297; see also Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life (New York: Wiley, 1999). The
entire special issue of Ambio was reprinted by the Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences as a monograph: Aftermath: The Human and Ecological Consequences
of Nuclear War, ed. Jeannie Peterson (New York: Pantheon, 1983); see Paul Crutzen
and John W. Birks, "The Atmosphere after a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon," 73-
96. Among those credited with advice and commentary on early drafts of the pa-
per were James Lovelock and Steven Schneider Small wonder, then, that it quickly
came to the attention of Sagan and others in NASA circles.

7 1 . Poundstone, Sagan, 297-298.

72. Ibid., 301-303.

73. Richard P Turco, Owen B. Toon, Thomas R Ackerman, James B. Pollack, and Carl
Sagan, "Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,"
Science 111, 23 December 1983, 1283-1292.

74. Donald DeVincenzi, "NASA's Exobiology Program," Origins of Life 14 (1984):
793-799; see 797.

75. DeVincenzi OHI, 28 January 1997.

76. Richard R Turco, Owen B. Toon, Thomas R Ackerman, James B. Pollack, and Carl
Sagan, "Climate and Smoke: An Appraisal of Nuclear Winter," Science 247, 12
January 1990, 166-176.

77. Richard Turco, "Carl Sagan and Nuclear Winter," in Carl Sagan s Universe, ed.
Yervant Terzian and Elizabeth Bilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 239-246.

78. DeVincenzi, "NASA's Exobiology Program," 798-799.

79. NAS Space Studies Board, The Search for Life's Origins (Washington, D.C.: NAS
Press, 1990).

80. Ibid,, 101.

81. Stanley Miller and Chris Chyba, "Whence Came Life?" Sky and Telescope (June
1992): 604-605; quote on 605.

82. Poundstone, Carl Sagan, 329-330.

83. Rummel OHI, 9. A concise version of the contrasting views of the Miller group
with Chyba and hydrothermal vent researchers is contained in point-counterpoint
fashion in Miller and Chyba, "Whence Came Life?"

84. Jon Cohen, "Novel Center Seeks to Add Spark to Origins of Life," Science 270,

272 Notes to Pages 127-135

22 December 1995, 1925-1926. Note the pun by which Cohen makes clear that
the NSCORT group pushes a strong Miller-Urey agenda.

85. Table courtesy of John Rummel.

86. Cohen, "Novel Center," 1925.

87. Wills and Bada, Spark. For their critique of exogenous delivery of organics, see
92-94; of "ventists," see esp. 96-101.

88. Cohen, "Novel Center," 1925; Wills and Bada, Spark, 101-105. For more recent
work on a wider rule for clays, see M. M. Hanczyc, S. M. Fujikawa, and J. W.
Szostak, "Experimental Models of Primitive Cellular Compartments: Encapsula-
tion, Growth, and Division," Science 302, 24 October 2003, 618-621.

89. Krugeretal., Ce//31 (1982): 147-157.

90. Cech to Strick, personal communication, 29 May 1997.

91. Schopf to Strick, personal communication, 14 May 2002.

92. See, e.g., Walter Gilbert, "The RNA World," Nature 319 (1986): 618, reprinted in
Deamer and Fleischaker, Origins, 375; see also Thomas Cech, "RNA as an En-
zyme," Scientific American 255 (November 1986): 64—75.

93. Gerald Joyce, "The Rise and Fall of the RNA World," New Biologist 3 (1991):
399^07.

94. Leslie Orgel, "The Origin of Life — A Review of Facts and Speculations," Trends
in Biochemical Sciences 23 (1998): 491-495.

95. Cronin to Strick, personal communication, 9 February 2000.

96. Ibid.

97. Cohen, "Novel Center," 1926.

98. Carl Woese, "On the Evolution of Cells," PNAS 99, 25 June 2002, 8742-8747.

Chapter 6 The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

1 . Portions of this chapter are based on Steven J. Dick, "The Search for Extraterres-
trial Intelligence and the NASA High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS): His-
torical Perspectives," Space Science Reviews 64 (1993): 93-139.

2. G. Cocconi and P. Morrison, Nature 184 (1959): 844-846. The proceedings of the
JPL meeting are in G. Mamikunian and M. H. Briggs, eds.. Current Aspects of Exo-
biology (Oxford; Pergamon Press, 1964). On Ozma and the Green Bank meeting,
see S. Dick, The Biological Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 414^31.

3. Billingham OHI, 12 September 1990, 1-5; Swift, SETI Pioneers (Tucson: Univer-
sity of Arizona Press), 247-278.

4. Billingham OHI, 6-7.

5. C. Ponnamperuma and A. G. W. Cameron, eds., Interstellar Communication: Sci-
entific Perspectives (Boston: Houghton Mifflin: 1974). The mini-study consisted
of only four people at Ames: David Black on planetary systems, Ponnamperuma
on origin of life. Dale Dunn on communications, and Billingham.

6. Oliver, OHI, 1-6; Swift, SETI Pioneers, 86-1 15. Many of Oliver's published and
unpublished papers on SETI are collected in The Selected Papers of Bernard M.
Oliver (Palo Alto, Calif: Hewlett-Packard, 1997).

7. B. Oliver and J. Billingham, Project Cyclops: A Design Study of a System for De-
tecting Extraterrestrial Intelligence, NASA CR 1 14445 (Washington, D.C.: NASA,
1972).

Notes to Pages 136-143 273

8. The first meeting of the Interstellar Communication Committee took place on 1
December 1972. Detailed minutes for all the meetings are in the SETI Institute
Archives. The original members of the Interstellar Communication Committee in-
cluded Billingham as chief, J. Wolfe as deputy chief, and D. Black, E. Duckworth,
R. Eddy, M. Hansen, H. Hornby, R. Johnson, and D. Lumb as members. Vera
Buescher soon joined and became a key member of the SETI team for the next
thirty years. Mark kept NASA administrator James Fletcher apprised of progress
and sought his support and advice. Mark to Fletcher, personal communication, 3
October 1972, SETI Institute Archives.

9. These studies are found in the SETI Institute Archives. The Fletcher quote is in
Richard Berenzden, ed.. Life beyond Earth and the Mind of Man, NASA SP-328
(Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1973). In order to concentrate on the interstellar com-
munication plans, in October Billingham obtained from his immediate boss. Chuck
Klein (who was simultaneously skeptical and supportive), and Hans Mark a sab-
batical from his position as Biotechnology Division chief

10. R Morrison, J. Billingham, and J. Wolfe, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,
NASA SP-419 (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1977). On Billingham 's remark, and for
a succinct overview of his role in NASA SETI, see Billingham, "SETI in NASA,"
presented at the conference commemorating Frank Drake's seventieth birthday and
forty years of SETI, held at Harvard and Boston Universities, 6-7 May 2000.

11. Ibid., 20. For the early discussions of the bimodal approach, see C. Seeger, in
Morrison et al.. Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, 77-92; and S. Gulkis, E.
Olsen, and J. Tarter, in M. Papagiannis, ed., Strategies in the Search for Life in the
Universe (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980), 93-105.

12. R. E. Edelson, Mercury 6, no. 4 (1977): 8-12; B. Murray, S. Gulkis, and R. E.
Edelson, Science 199 (1978): 485^92; D. Black et al., Mercury 6, no. 4 (1977): 4-7.

13. NASA, Outlook for Space: Report to the NASA Administrator by the Outlook for
Space Study Group (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1976), 38, 1435-149.

14. J. Wolfe et al., in J. Billingham, ed.. Life in the Universe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1981), 391^17.

15. Ibid., 391-417. The detectability of terrestrial transmitters at interstellar distances,
and the implications for detection of leakage radiation from extraterrestrial civili-
zations, was studied by Woodruff T. Sullivan III and his colleagues in Sullivan, S.
Brown, and C. Wetherill, Science 199 (1978): 377-388, and reviewed in Billingham,
Life in the Universe, 377-390.

16. R Drake, J. Wolfe, and C. Seeger, SETI Science Working Group Report, NASA
Technical Paper 2244 (1983).

17. Michael Hart, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society (QJRAS) 16
(1975): 128-135; D. Viewing, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS)
28 (1975); 735-744.

18. M. Hart and B. Zuckerman, Extraterrestrials: Where Are They? (New York:
Pergamon, 1982; 2d ed. with new chapters published by Cambridge University
Press, 1995); E Tipler, QJRAS 21 (1980): 267-281 and 22 (1981): 133-145 and
279-292; J. Barrow and F. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986); D. Brin, QJRAS 24 (1983): 283-309.

19. Senator William Proxmire, press release, 16 February 1978; U.S. Congress, Extra-
terrestrial Intelligence Research, Hearings before the Space Science and Applica-
tions Subcommmittee of the Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House

274 Notes to Pages 143-151

of Representatives, 95th Cong., 2d sess., 19-20 September 1978. For congressional
action related to SETI, I am indebted to Vera Buescher's unpublished compilation,
"A Brief History of Congressional Actions Regarding the Search for Extraterres-
trial Intelligence (SETI)," SETI Institute, October 1995.

20. Introduction, Billingham, Life in the Universe. This volume is the proceedings of
a meeting held at NASA Ames in 1979.

2 1 . Congressional Record, Senate, 30 July 1 98 1 , S 88 1 2; Congressional Record, House,
1 1 September 1981, H 6156; Frank Drake, '"Putting the Cosmos on Hold," Cosmic
Search (1982): 8-9.

22. National Research Council (NRC), Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 1980s (Field
report) (Washington, D.C.: NRC, 1982).

23. The technical details of the system implemented in 1992 have been described by
the participants elsewhere. See G. R. Coulter, M. J. Klein, R R. Backus, and J. D.
Rummel, "Searching for Intelligent Life in the Universe: NASA's High Resolution
Microwave Survey," Space Biology and Medicine 3 (1993).

24. On the MCSA 1.0, see A. M. Peterson, K. S. Chen, and I. R. Linscott, "The Multi-
channel Spectrum Analyzer," in The Search for Extraterrestrial Life: Recent Devel-
opments, ed. M. D. Papagiannis (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), 373-383.

25. I. R. Linscott, J. Duluk, J. Burr, and A. Peterson, in Bioastronomy: The Next Steps,
ed. G. Marx (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1988), 319-335.

26. On the software algorithms see Cullers, "Software Implementation of Detection
Algorithms for the MCSA," in Pagiagiannis, Search for Extraterrestrial Life.
385-390.

27. On the WBSA, see M. R Quirk, M. F Garyantes, H. C. Wilck, and M. J. Grimm,
IEEE Transactions on Acoustical Speech Signal Processing 36 (1988): 1854-1861.
On the sky survey signal processing and data acquisition, see E. T. Olsen, A.
Lokshin, and S. Gulkis, "An Analysis of the Elements of an All Sky Survey," in
Papagiannis, Search for Extraterrestrial Life, 405-410.

28. NASA, Program Plan for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, MS, NASA
1987.

29. Alan Boss, Looking for Earths (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1998), 1 17-118.

30. Tarter, OHI, 2; Swift, SETI Pioneers, 346-377.

31. Tarter, OHI, 18-19; Pierson OHI.

32. Congressional Record, House, H4356^359, 28 June 1990.

33. Senate Report 101-474, to accompany H.R. 5158, 10 September 1990.

34. A summary of the Lederberg workshop was included in the 1977 landmark
Morrison volume. Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The CASETI proceed-
ings were eventually published as J. Billingham et al.. Social Implications of the
Detection of an Extraterrestrial Civilization (Mountain View, Calif: SETI Press,
1999).

35. News bulletin, Richard Bryan, U.S. senator. State of Nevada, 103d Cong., "Bryan
Amendment Passes to Cut Expensive Search for "Martians" — Great Martian Chase
to End?" 22 September 1993. The debate is found in Congressional Record. Sen-
ate, 22 September 1993, S 12151-12153. On Bryan's previous action on 14 May
1991 (for FY 1992), see news bulletin, Richard Bryan, "Bryan Eliminates Gov-
ernment Waste, Cuts $14.5 Million Martian Hunt," 14 May 1991; news bulletin,
Richard Bryan, "Senate Committee Votes to Cut Alien Search Funding," 16 June
1992.

Notes to Pages 152-159 275

36. Bryan, 22 September 1993 press release; and George Johnson, "E.T., Don't Call
Us, We'll Call You. Someday," New York Times, 10 October 1993, 4:2.

37. Stephen J. Garber, "Searching for Good Science: The Cancellation of NASA's SETI
Program," JBIS 52 (1999): 3-12.

38. Keay Davidson, '"Giggle Factor' Helps Kill Project to Contact Aliens," Washing-
ton Times, 10 October 1993, D8; Christopher Anderson and Jeffrey Mervis, "Con-
gress Boosts NSF, NASA Budgets," Science 262, 8 October 1993, 173. For an
interview with the headquarters manager for SETI as these events were occurring,
see Coulter OHI, 30 September 1993.

39. Wesley T. Huntress to Dale Compton and Ed Stone, letter, 12 October 1993, SETI
Institute Archives, folder marked "U.S. Congress, NASA HRMS Termination"; "To-
ward Other Planetary Systems, High Resolution Microwave Survey, Project Ter-
mination Report," 31 March 1994 (Ames Research Center and JPL).

40. Jill Tarter, "Past and Future Observing Plans: The Fate of the NASA HRMS, Soon
to Be Reborn as Project Phoenix," SETI News 3, no. 1 (first quarter, 1994): 1.

Chapter 7 The Search for Planetary Systems

1 . Oliver and Billingham, Project Cyclops: A Design Study of a System for Detecting
Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life, NASA CR 1 1445 (Washington, D.C.: NASA, I97I),
13-15; A. G. W. Cameron, "Planetary Systems in the Galaxy," in Interstellar Com-
munication: Scientific Perspectives, ed. Cyril Ponnamperuma and A. G. W. Cameron
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 26-44.

2. The agenda and attendee list for the workshop is in The Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence, ed. Philip Morrison, John Billingham, and John Wolfe, NASA SP-
419 (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1977), 269 ff. Detailed minutes of the workshops
are located at the SETI Institute archives.

3. Black OHI, I, 4; Oliver and Billingham, Project Cyclops, 14-15; Alan Boss, Look-
ing for Earths: The Race to Find New Solar Systems (New York: Wiley and Sons,
1998), 30. The Second Workshop on Extrasolar Planetary Detection was held at
NASA Ames Research Center, 20-21 May 1976.

4. Morrison et al.. Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, 57-58; Boss, Looking for
Earths, 79. Bracewell had written The Galactic Club (San Francisco: W. H. Free-
man, 1974) and in the aftermath of the NASA meetings wrote "Detecting Nonsolar
Planets by Spinning Infrared Interferometer," Nature 274 (1978): 780.

5. Minutes of the NASA-Ames Astrometric Conference, U.S. Naval Observatory,
Washington, D.C., 10-11 May 1976, SETI Institute Archives.

6. Jesse Greenstein and David Black, "Detection of Other Planetary Systems," in
Morrison et al.. Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, 55-60.

7. Black, OHI, 5; David Black, ed.. Project Orion: A Design Study of a System for
Detecting Extrasolar Planets (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1980). This book is based
on the 1976 NASA/ASEE-Stanford Summer Faculty Workshop in Engineering Sys-
tems Design, 14 June-20 August 1976. The appendix includes discussion of Space
Telescope capability to detect planets.

8. David C. Black and William E. Brunk, eds.. An Assessment of Ground-Based
Techniques for Detecting Other Planetary Systems, NASA CP-2124 (Washington, D.C.:
NASA 1980), 1 :4-8. Volume I is an overview, and volume 2 presents position papers.

9. Black OHI, 8.

2 76 Notes to Pages 160-167

10. Black OHI, 5-9; Black, "In Search of Planetary Systems," Space Science Reviews
25 (January 1980): 35-81.

1 1 . Foreword to Black and Brunk.

12. David C. Black, "Prospects for Detecting Other Planetary Systems," in Life in the
Universe, ed. John Billingham (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981). The meet-
ing was held at Ames on 19-20 June 1979. Black reviewed the prospects in more
detail in his article in "In Search of Planetary Systems."

13. For a single telescope the case of "speckle interferometry" for planet detection was
put forth at the Ames meeting by Simon R Worden, "Detecting Planets in Binary
Systems with Speckle Interferometry." It had been put forward earlier by one of
the pioneers in the technique, H. A. McAlister, in "Speckle Interferometry as a
Method for Detecting Nearby Extrasolar Planets," Icarus 30 (1977): 789-792. Al-
though the technique proved extremely useful for binary star observations, by the
end of the century it had not yet detected any planets.

14. Life in the Universe, ed. John Billingham (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981),
xiv.

15. Bernard F Burke, ed., TOPS: Toward Other Planetary Systems: A Report by the
Solar System Exploration Division (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1992), preface, vii.

16. Planetary Exploration through the Year 2000: A Core Program, SSEC Report, May
1983. The Space Science Board and COMPLEX reports were: Report on Space
Science 1975 (1976); Strategy for Exploration of the Inner Planets: 1977-1987
(1978); and Strategy for Exploration of Primitive Solar System Bodies (1980). Pages
4-7 of the latter report placed the origin of the solar system in the broader context
of star formation in the galaxy.

17. On the long-standing "love-hate" relationship between NASA and the Space Sci-
ence Board, see Homer Newell, Beyond the Atmosphere, 205-214; Boss, Looking
for Earths, 82-83; and Black OHI, 9-10.

18. Strategy for the Detection and Study of Other Planetary Systems and Extrasolar
Planetary Materials: 1990-2000 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press,
1990), 1-3. It is notable that the chairman of COMPLEX from 1985 to 1988 was
Robert Pepin, who had been Black's thesis advisor at the University of Minnesota.

19. Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee, National Academy of Sciences,
National Research Council, The Decade of Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics
(Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1991), 30-31.

20. Planetary Exploration through the Year 2000: An Augmented Program (Washing-
ton, D.C.; NASA, 1986), 15.

21. H. H. Aumann et al., "Discovery of a Shell around Alpha Lyrae," Astrophysical
Journal 278, 1 March 1984, L23-L27; front page of the Washington Post, 10 Au-
gust 1983. The story of the "Vega Phenomenon" is told in Ken Crosswell, Planet
Quest: The Epic Discovery of Alien Solar Systems (New York: Free Press, 1997),
100-113.

22. Planetary Exploration, 22, 183-184.

23 . Ibid. , 205 ; Black OHI, 1 0- 1 3 .

24. Other Worlds from Earth: The Future of Planetary Astronomy (Washington, D.C.:
NASA, 1989), 9, 21-31.

25. Ibid., 21-31, 68-69, 76-81, 90-91, 95. The ATF is described and pictured on pages
68-69 and the CIT on pages 78-79. Their strengths and weaknesses are described
on91.

Notes to Pages 167-1 77 277

26. TOPS. The work of the PSSWG is colorfully described by one of its members in
^oss. Looking for Earths, esp. 83-86, 127-132.

27. TOPS, viii.

28. Ibid., 59-66.

29. Ibid., 99-1 10, on the Keck telescopes for planet searches; Boss, Looking for Earths,
97-98. On NASA funding for Keck at the rate of 6.8 million per year from 1994
to 2000, see Boss, Looking for Earths, 128.

30. R. A. Brown and C. J. Burrows, "On the Feasibility of Detecting Extrasolar Plan-
ets by Reflected Starlight Using the Hubble Space Telescope," Icarus 87 (1990):
484; Black, OHI, 16; Boss, Looking for Earths, 85-86.

31. Boss, Looking for Earths, 104-106.

32. TOPS 59, 114-117.

33. Boss, Looking for Earths, 122-124, 128.

34. TOPS, xviii, and p. 1.

35. Paul Butler to S. Dick, personal communication, 13 February 2002. Butler's master's
thesis was entitled "A Precision Astronomical Instrument to Measure Doppler Shifts."

36. Butler to Dick, personal communication, 13 February 2002.

37. The discoveries of the first planets around solar-type stars by the Swiss team of
Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz and the American team of Marcy and Butler have
been described many times; see especially Crosswell, Planet Quest; Michael D.
Lemonick, Other Worlds: The Search for Life in the Universe (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1998); and Donald Goldsmith, Worlds Unnumbered: The Search for
Extrasolar Planets (Sausalito, Calif: University Science Books, 1997).

38. Steven Beckwith and Anneila Sargent review progress in "Circumstellar Disks and
the Search for Neighbouring Planetary Systems," Nature 383, 12 September 1996,
139-144. The "proplyds" of Orion are announced in C. R. Odell and Z. Wen,
Astrophysical Journal 387(1 994): 1 94-202.

39. The Space Interferometry Mission: Taking the Measure of the Universe, Final Re-
port of the Space Interferometry Science Working Group, 5 April 1996. NASA/
JPL published a more popular version under the same title in March 1999. On the
twists and turns of the committee's goals and actions, see "History of the Working
Group" in the 1996 document.

40. HST and Beyond — Exploration and the Search for Origins: A Vision for Ultraviolet-
Optical-Infrared Space Astronomy (Washington, D.C.: AURA, 1996).

4 1 . Charles Beichman, ed., Roadmapfor the Exploration of Neighboring Planetary Sys-
tems (August 1996).

42. R. N. Bracewell, Nature ll'X (1978): 780; Roger Angel, in Next Generation Space
Telescope, ed. R Bely, C. Burrows, and J. G. Illingworth (1990), 81-94; M. Shao,
in same volume, 160.

43. BtK\m\ar\, Roadmap, 10-16.

44. Ltmomck, Other Worlds, \()\.

45. Harley Thronson, "Our Cosmic Origins: NASA's Origins Theme and the Search
for Earth-like Planets," in Planets beyond the Solar System and the Next Genera-
tion of Space Missions, ed. D. R. Soderblom (San Francisco: Astronomical Soci-
ety of the Pacific, 1997).

46. Origins: Roadmap for the Office of Space Science Origins Theme (Washington,
DC: NASA, 1997). The original forty-eight-page publication was updated in April
2000 with a ninety-four-page publication.

278 Notes to Pages 1 77-182

47. C. A. Beichman, N. J. Woolf, and C. A. Lindensmith, The Terrestrial Planet Finder
(TPF): A NASA Origins Program to Search for Habitable Planets, JPL Publication
99-3 (May 1999). The European Space Agency also proposed a space infrared in-
terferometer known as "Darwin."

Chapter 8 The Mars Rock

1 . John Noble Wilford, "Clues in Meteorite Seem to Show Signs of Life on Mars Long
Ago," New York Times, 1 August 1996, Al, AlO.

2. John Noble Wilford, "Mars and Its Meteorites Targets of New Research," New York
Times, 13 August 1996, CI, C8.

3. William J. Broad, "Jupiter's Moon Europa Could Be Habitat for Life," New York
Times, 13 August 1996, CI, C7. See also Broad, "Scientists Widen the Hunt for
Alien Life," New York Times, 6 May 1997, Arizona ed., B9, 15.

4. John Noble Wilford, "Plotting a Mission to Retrieve Rocks from Mars," New York
Times, 10 September 1996, Arizona ed., B5, 9. By January 1999 the sample return
was being planned for 2008, after an ambitious series of preparatory missions. See
William Broad, "Spacecraft Speed to Mars, High Hopes on Board," New York Times,
5 January 1999, D5.

5. Chris Romanek OHI and David McKay OHI; Everett Gibson OHI; the published
article was David S. McKay et al., "Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic
Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001," Science TTi, 16 August 1996,
924-930.

6. Richard Kerr, "A Lunar Meteorite and Maybe Some from Mars," Science 220, 1 5
April 1983,288-289.

7. Bogard and Johnson, "Martian Gases in an Antarctic Meteorite," Science 221, 12
August 1983, 651-654.

8. Brian Mason, "A Lode of Meteorites," Natural History 90 (April 1981): 62-67.

9. Each of the rocks resembled most closely one of the three meteorites first found in
this group, Shergotty, Nakhla, and Chassigny. Nakhla fell near El Nakhla el Baharia,
Egypt, on 28 June 1911.

1 0. Kerr, "Lunar Meteorite," 288. The age of Shergotty was later found to be only 1 65
to 300 million years since crystallization, indicating that Mars must have had at
least intermittent volcanism until fairly recently.

11. Ibid., 289.

12. Ibid.

13. Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada, The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval
Soup (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2000), 237.

14. Richard Kerr, "Martian Meteorites Are Arriving," Science 237, 14 August 1987,
721.

15. Ibid.

1 6. See <http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/snc/> for the latest update on new SNC meteorites.

17. Everett Gibson et al., "Life on Mars: Evaluation of the Evidence within Martian
Meteorites ALH84001, Nakhla, and Shergotty," Precambrian Research 106, 1 Feb-
ruary 2001, 16. They cite D. Bogard and D. Garrison, "Noble Gas Abundances in
SNC Meteorites," Meteoritics and Planetary Science 33 (1998): A19.

18. Ian R Wright, Monica M. Grady, and Colin T. Pillinger, "Organic Materials in a
Martian Meteorite," Nature 340 (1989): 220-222. This team had used an indirect

Notes to Pages 1 82-1 90 2 79

method that did not attempt to characterize the organic matter; hence, the ALH84001
team could claim to have made the first direct measurements of organic molecules
in a Martian meteorite. See Romanek OHI, 21-22. For a somewhat ironic look at
the history of "life on meteorite" claims, see Colin and J. M. Pillinger, "A Brief
History of Exobiology, or There's Nothing New in Science," Meteoritics and Plan-
etary Science 32 (1997): 443^45.

19. Wills and Bada, Spark, 236.

20. Romanek OHI, 4.

21. The length of time in space was determined by isotopic changes produced by cos-
mic ray exposure there. See McKay et al., "Possible Relic," 924.

22. Romanek OHI, 3.

23. Romanek OHI, 4-5; Romanek et al.. Nature 372 (1994): 655-659.

24. McKay et al., "Possible Relic," 924. Harvey and McSween later withdrew their high-
temperature model for the carbonates in ALH84001 .

25. Romanek OHI, 6.

26. Ibid., 6-7.

27. David McKay OHI; McKay's funding from NASA Exobiology began in 1990 for
analysis of cosmic dust for carbon.

28. Romanek OHI, 7-8.

29. Ibid., 9. For Schopf's account of his January 1995 visit and his opinion at that time,
see J. William Schopf, Cradle of Life: The Discovery of Earth's Earliest Fossils
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 304-305.

30. Romanek OHI, 9-10; see also McKay et al., "Possible Relic." The team believed
the PAHs toward the outside of the meteorite were burned off, vaporized as the
rock entered Earth's atmosphere and was heated.

3 1 . McKay et al., "Possible Relic," 929.

32. Romanek OHI, 15. Four of the five anonymous peer reviewers for Science identi-
fied themselves afterward to the team. Gibson later discovered that Carl Sagan was
the fifth. In the end Sagan and the others were satisfied with the changes and rec-
ommended publication; see Gibson OHI, 6.

33. For a thorough and philosophically astute analysis of the argument in the 1996 pa-
per and of the first responses, through late 1998, see Iris Fry, The Emergence of
Life on Earth (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 222-235.

34. McKay et al., "Possible Relic," 924.

35. Gibson et al., "ALH84001, Nakhla and Shergotty," 16.

36. McKay et al., "Possible Relic," 927.

37. Ibid., 925.

38. Ibid., 928. The 1996 paper used the spelling nannobacteria, apparently after Folk's
original usage. This was later (by late 1997) corrected to a standardized spelling
of nanobacteria, analogous to metric terms beginning with the prefix nana-.

39. Romanek OHI.

40. McKay OHI, 11.

41. Some scientists insisted that James D. Watson was unique in I952-I953 in the de-
gree to which he described being driven by desire for priority in discovering the
structure of DNA (in his 1968 memoir The Double Helix). By 1996 such behavior
seems to have become more common — or at least more commonly acknowledged.

42. Gibson OHI.

43. Schopf, Cradle. 306-309.

280 Notes to Pages 190-194

44. Gibson OHI, 5. It was the press recognition that this otherwise unknown woman
had an inside track to highly sensitive information from the White House itself
which led shortly afterward to the revelation that she had a personal relationship
with Dick Morris.

45. Meyer OHI, 12.

46. Gibson OHI; Romanek and McKay OHI. See Romanek OHI.

47. Michael Meyer OHI, 12. A history of early disputes and standards is Ron Westrum,
"Science and Social Intelligence about Anomalies: The Case of Meteorites," So-
cial Studies of Science 8 (1978); 461^93.

48. H. R Klein OHI; Donald DeVincenzi OHI.

49. Richard Kerr, "Requiem for Life on Mars? Support for Microbes Fades," Science
282, 20 November 1998, 1398. For more of Kerr's coverage of the ongoing debate
for Science, see also "Martian Rocks Tell Divergent Stories," Science 274, 8 No-
vember 1996, 918-919; "Martian 'Microbes' Cover Their Tracks," Science 276, 4
April 1 997, 30-31; "Putative Martian Microbes Called Microscopy Artifacts," Sci-
ence 278, 5 December 1997, 1706-1707; "Geologists Take a Trip to the Red Planet,"
Science 282, 4 December 1998, 1807-1809; "Are Martian 'Pearl Chains' Signs of
Life?" Science 291, 9 March 2001, 1875-1876; "Rethinking Water on Mars and
the Origin of Life," Science 292, 6 April 2001, 39^0; "Reversals Reveal Pitfalls
in Spotting Ancient and E.T. Life," Science 296, 24 May 2002, 1384-1385.

50. Meyer Offl, 13-14.

51. Schopf, Crat/fe, 308.

52. Ibid., chap. 12; quotes on 306.

53. OroOHI, 13-14.

54. Quoted in Schopf, Cradle, 304.

55. Romanek OHI, 9.

56. On the enthusiasm generated for planetary exploration, see Dava Sobel, "Among
Planets," New Yorker, 9 December 1996, 84-90. The first round of scientific criti-
cism appeared in Science 273, 20 September 1996, under the title "Past Life on
Mars?"; it included Frank Von Hippel and Ted Von Hippel (1639), Harold Morowitz
(1639-1640), Louis DeTolla (1640), with a reply by McKay, Gibson, and Thomas-
Keprta (1640). A second more detailed round of criticisms appeared in the 20 De-
cember 1996 issue of Science, including; Jeffrey Bell, "Evaluating Evidence for
Past Life on Mars," 2 1 2 1-2 1 22; Edward Anders, 2119-21 20.

57. Kerr, "Martian 'Microbes,'" 30-31.

58. Gibson et al., "ALH84001, Nakhla, and Shergotty," 16-18.

59. Kerr, "Martian 'Microbes,'" 3 1 .

60. Ibid.

61. J. R Bradley, R. R Harvey, and H. Y. McSween Jr., "No 'Nanofossils' in Martian
Meteorite," Nature 390, 4 December 1997, 454.

62. David McKay, Everett Gibson, Kathie Thomas-Keprta, and Hojatollah Vali, "No
'Nanofossils' in Martian Meteorite; A Reply," Nature, 4 December 1997, 455^56.

63 . Kerr, "Martian ' Meteorites,' "31.

64. Jack Maniloff, Kenneth H. Nealson, Roland Psenner, Maria Loferer, and Robert
Folk, "Nannobacteria; Size Limits and Evidence," Science 276 (June 1997); 1776-
1777; Nicholas Wade, "Mars Meteorite Fuels Debate on Life on Earth," New York
Times, 29 July 1997, CI, 3; Schopf, Cradle, 316-321. Note, again, that the
nanobacteria spelling only became standardized usage in late 1997.

Notes to Pages 194-196 281

65. Morowitz, "Past Life on Mars?" Science 273, 20 September 1996, 1639.

66. DeTolla, "Past Life on Mars?" 1640; E. Olavi Kajander, I. Kuronen, and N.
Ciftcioglu, "Fetal Bovine Serum: Discovery of Nanobacteria," Molecular Biology
of the Cell, 7, 3007 (supp. S); E. O. Kajander, L Kuronen, K. Akerman, A. Pelttari,
and N. Ciftcioglu, "Nanobacteria from Blood, the Smallest Culturable Autonomously
Replicating Agent on Earth," Proceedings of the Society for Optical Engineering
(SPIE), 3111 (1997), 420-428; Milton Wainwright, "Nanobacteria and Associated
'Elementary Bodies' in Human Disease and Cancer," Microbiology Today 145 (Oc-
tober 1999): 2623-2624.

67. Wade, "Meteorite Fuels Debate"; Philippa Uwins, Richard 1. Webb, and Anthony
P. Taylor, "Novel Nano-Organisms from Australian Sandstones," American Miner-
alogist 83 (1998): 1541-1550; William J. Broad, "Scientists Find Smallest Form
of Life, if It Lives," New York Times, 1 8 January 2000, Arizona ed., D 1 , 4.

68. Kajander, "Nanobacteria from Blood," 420.

69. Gretchen Vogel, "Finding Life's Limits," Science 282, 20 November 1998, 1399.

70. Kerr, "Requiem," 1398. A 100 nm sphere, though half the diameter of a 200 nm
sphere, it should be noted, has only one-eighth the volume.

71. Ibid.

72. Broad, "Scientists Find Smallest Form of Life," D4.

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid.

75. Derek Sears and William Hartmann, "Conference on Early Mars, Houston, Texas,
24-27 April 1997," Meteoritics and Planetary Science 32 (1997): 445^46.

76. Jan Toporski, Andrew Steele, Frances Westall, Kathie Thomas-Keprta, and David
McKay, "The Simulated Silicification of Bacteria — New Clues to the Modes and
Timing of Bacterial Preservation and Implications for the Search for Extraterres-
trial Microfossils," Astrobiology 2 (Spring 2002): 1-26.

77. Frances Westall, "The Nature of Fossil Bacteria: A Guide to the Search for Extra-
terrestrial Life," Journal of Geophysical Research 104, no. E7, 25 July 1999, 16437-
16451.

78. Kerr, "Requiem," 1400.

79. Buseck to Strick, personal communication, 30 May 2002. The grant, for the pe-
riod from August 2001 through June 2003, was for $401 ,673.

80. Ibid.; this grant, for the period from August 2002 through July 2005, totals $21,141.
Buseck has numerous other NASA grants and has been a grantee of NASA Cos-
mochemistry since 1978.

8 1 . Sears and Hartmann, "Conference on Early Mars," 445—446.

82. Luann Becker, Daniel P. Glavin, and Jeffrey L. Bada, "Polycyclic Aromatic Hy-
drocarbons (PAHs) in Antarctic Martian Meteorites, Carbonaceous Chondrites, and
Polar Ice," Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 61 (1997): 475^81; see also A. J.
T. Jull, C. Courtney, D. A. Jeffrey, and J. W. Beck, "Isotopic Evidence for a Terres-
trial Source of Organic Compounds Found in Martian Meteorites Allan Hills 84001
and Elephant Moraine 79001," Science 279, 16 January 1998, 366-369.

83. RomanekOHI, 11.

84. Kerr, "Requiem," 1400.

85. Jeffrey L. Bada, Daniel P Glavin, Gene D. McDonald, and Luann Becker, "A Search
for Endogenous Amino Acids in the Martian Meteorite ALH84001," Science 279,
16 January 1998, 362-365; see also Daniel Glavin, Jeffrey Bada, Karen Brinton,

282 Notes to Pages 196-200

and Gene McDonald, "Amino Acids in the Martian Meteorite Nakhla,"PA!^5' 96
(August 1999): 8835-8838.

86. Glavin et al., "Amino Acids, 8835.

87. Jeffrey Bada and Gene McDonald, "Detecting Amino Acids on Mars," Analytical
Chemistry 68 (1996): 674A. Naturally, the line of reasoning employed here fore-
grounds the role of Miller-Urey synthesis, notwithstanding the recent consensus of
skepticism about the relevance of a reducing atmosphere on early Earth, let alone Mars.

88. Kerridge, "Life on Mars? A Critique," talk presented in Geology Department, Ari-
zona State University, 26 March 1997. Kerridge had trained under J. D. Bernal and
Alan Mackay at Birkbeck College, University of London. He first became con-
nected with the NASA Exobiology community through an NRC postdoc at Ames,
then he worked on isotope geochemistry with David DesMarais, under Ian Kaplan
at UCLA, 1975-76. He has received exobiology grant support fairly steadily since
the 1970s. John Kerridge OHI.

89. Ibid., 23.

90. DeVincenzi OHI, 12 May 1997, 19.

91. Ibid.

92. Kerr, "Requiem."

93. Imre Friedmann, Jacek Wierzchos, Carmen Ascaso, and Michael Winklhofer,
"Chains of Magnetite Crystals in the Meteorite ALH84001: Evidence of Biologi-
cal Origin," PNAS 98,27 February 200 1 , 2 1 76-2 181.

94. K. L. Thomas-Keprta et al., "Truncated Hexa-octahedral Magnetite Crystals in
ALH84001: Presumptive Biosignatures," PNAS 98, 27 February 2001, 2164; see
also Thomas-Keprta et al., "Elongated Prismatic Magnetite Crystals in ALH84001
Carbonate Globules: Potential Martian Magnetofossils," Geochimica et
Cosmochimica Acta 64 (December 2000): 4049^081.

95. See Kathy Sawyer, "New Findings Energize Case for Life on Mars," Washington
Post, 27 February 2001, A3, 24.

96. Richard Kerr, "Are Martian 'Pearl Chains' Signs of Life?" Science 291, 9 March
2001, 1875-1876.

97. Cronin to Strick, personal communication, 15 December 2001.

98. Buseck to Strick, personal communication, 30 May 2002.

99. Fry, Emergence, 221 .

100. Martin Brasier et al., "Questioning the Evidence for Earth's Oldest Fossils,"
Nature 416, 7 March 2002, 76-81.

101. J. William Schopf, Anatoliy Kudryavtsev, David Agresti, Thomas Wdowiak, and
Andrew Czaja, "Laser-Raman Imagery of Earth's Earliest Fossils," Nature 416, 7
March 2002, 73-76. See also, from that issue, Henry Gee, "That's Life?" 28.

102. David Tenenbaum, "Ancient Fossils — or Just Plain Rocks," Astrobiology News. 6
(January 2003), <http://www.astrobio.net/news/print.php?sid=350>.

103. See, e.g., Kenneth Chang, "Oldest Bacteria Fossils? Or Are They Merely Tiny Rock
Flaws?" New York Times, 12 March 2002, D4.

104. Two very different accounts have appeared; see Richard Kerr, "Reversals Reveal Pit-
falls," Science 1384-1385; see also Rex Dalton, "Microfossils: Squaring Up over An-
cient Life," Nature 417, 21 June 2002, 782-784. The Nature account is much more
supportive of the British team and highly accusatory of Schopf 's behavior as a scientist.

105. S. J. Mojzsis, Gustaf Arrhenius, K. D. McKeegan, T. M. Harrison, A. R Nutman,

Notes to Pages 200-209 283

and C. R. L. Friend, "Evidence for Life on Earth before 3800 Million Years Ago,"
Nature 384, 7 November 1996, 55-59.

106. See the exchange between both sides in the debate in Science 298, 1 November
2002, 917a ("Technical Comments" section) and 961-962.

107. Kerr, "Reversals Reveal Pitfalls." Schopf must surely be chagrined at inclusion in
such company, particularly given the publicity he received for taking the McKay
team to task for errors parallel to those he now stands accused of.

108. Ibid., 1385. See also the comments of paleontologist Roger Buick in a 7 January
2003 press release, <http://www.spaceref com/news/viewprhtml?pid=10315>.

109. Gibson to Strick, personal communication, 7 June 2002.

Chapter 9 Renaissance

1 . Glenn E. Bugos, Atmosphere of Freedom: Sixty Years at the NASA Ames Research
Center (Washington, D.C.: NASA History Office, 2000), 224-225.

2. "A Budget Reduction Strategy" (MS, 2 February 1995, NASA Ames files).

3. Harper OHI, 17 January 2001, 19. The ECHO report is David Milne et al.. The
Evolution of Complex and Higher Organisms: A Report Prepared by the Partici-
pants of Workshops Held at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Califor-
nia, July 1981, January 1982, and May 1982 (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1985).

4. DeVincenzi OHI 12 May 1997, 11; Harper OHI, 13 May 1997, 13; Harper OHI,
17 January 2001, 13.

5. Among those who had crucial input to the late March meeting were Lynn Harper
and Kathleen Connell. Outside NASA the word astrobiology actually predates
Joshua Lederberg's coining of the term exobiology in 1961. For example, the Ameri-
can astronomer Otto Struve pondered the use of astrobiology to apply to the broad
study of life beyond Earth in "Life on Other Worlds," Sky and Telescope 14 (Feb-
ruary 1955): 137-146. But until 1995 the gxodio/ogy terminology was used almost
exclusively among biologists, while bioastronomy was used among astronomers.

6. Dear Colleague letter, 30 May 1995, by Wesley T. Huntress.

7. Harper, OHI, 13 May, 1997, 14. Astrobiology was mentioned three places in NASA's
1996 Strategic Plan: in the Human Exploration and Development (HEDS) section,
in which a map showed astrobiology assigned to Ames; in the Space Science sec-
tion, in which Ames is identified with astrobiology in a diagram showing primary
NASA center missions and roles; and in the glossary, in which astrobiology was
defined as "the study of the living universe" in the terms used earlier

8. DeVinczenzi, OHI, 12.

9. Harper, OHI 1 7 January 200 1 , 3.

10. Meyer OHI, 4 February 1997, 2-A. The exobiology budget at Headquarters had
been 9.4 million, but 1 million was transferred to the Planetary Instruments Defi-
nition and Development Program, a result of centralization of planetary instrument
development in the Space Science Division.

1 1 . Tony Reichhardt, "NASA Lines Up for a Bigger Slice of the Biological Research
Pie," Nature 391 (1998): 109; Morrison OHI, 3; Harper OHI.

1 2 . Harper OHI, 1 7 January 200 1 , 1 7- 1 8 .

13. Ibid., 5.

14. D. Devincenzi, ed., Astrobiology Workshop Final Report: Leadership in Astrobiology,

284 Notes to Pages 209-218

Proceedings of a Workshop Held at NASA Ames Research Center, 9-1 1 September
1996, NASA Conference Publication 10153, (Ames Research Center, NASA, 1996).

15. G. Soffen, "Astrobiology: A Program Plan," 30 June 1997, stamped "Draft," NASA
Ames files. An annotation dated 4 July 1997 indicated the draft plan had been seen
by Huntress and forwarded to Goldin.

16. Astrobiology Development Plan, NASA Ames Research Center, 7 May 1997, re-
vision 2; Harper OHI, 17 January 2001, 5.

17. Astrobiology Development Plan; "Ames First Astrobiology Mission Studies Leonid
Firestorm over Okinawa," Ames Astrogram, 27 November 1998, 1, 4.

18. Astrobiology Development Plan.

19. Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York:
Random House, 1994). The first Pale Blue Dot Workshop was held at Ames on
27-28 June 1996 and the second at Ames on 19-21 May 1999. The reports of
these workshops, and those described subsequently, are available at <http://
www.astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/workshops/index.html>.

20. Sara E. Acevedo, Donald L. DeVincenzi, and Sherwood Chang, eds., Sixth Sym-
posium on Chemical Evolution and the Origin and Evolution of Life, sponsored by
Michael Meyer, NASA CP- 1998- 10 156 (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1998).

21. Morrison OHI, 7-8. Harper OHI, 13 May 1997, 21.

22. Draft Cooperative Agreement Notice (CAN), sec. 1, intro.

23. NASA News Release, "NASA Selects Initial Members of New Virtual Astrobiol-
ogy Institute," 19 May 1998; Andrew Lawler, "Astrobiology Institute Picks Part-
ners," Science 280, 29 May 1998, 1338; Harry McDonald, e-mail to Ames staff,
19 May 1998.

24. Lawler, "Astrobiology Institute Picks Partners," 1338.

25. NASA News Release 99-3 3 AR, "Nobel Prize Winner to Lead NASA Astrobiol-
ogy Institute," 18 May 1999. Blumberg would remain director until 14 October
2002; UCLA professor Bruce Runnegar was named as his successor.

26. The Genomics/Station workshop grew out of Astrobiology 's "biology beyond the
planet of origin," which became "terrestrial life into space" in the roadmap. This
element later became the centerpiece for the Generations Initiative approved for
the 2003 budget. Harper was the originator of the initiative and did the feasibility
and conceptual studies. Greg Schmidt and Kathleen Connnell were instrumental
in selling it. And Mel Averner was the primary sponsor and champion. Blumberg
again played a pivotal role. This completed the second-to-last piece of the Astrobi-
ology Roadmap findings to obtain national approval. The one remaining was in
Earth Sciences "co-evolution of life in the environment" theme.

27. "Remarks of NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin," NASA Ames Research Center
Astrobiology Institute, 18 May 1999; Michael Mecham, "Astrobiology Team Tak-
ing Shape at Ames," Aviation Week and Space Technology 150, 14 June 14 1999,
211-212; Washington Post, 18 August 1999; Rebecca Rawls, "Fledgling Astrobi-
ology Institute Aims to Foster Collaboration in Study of the Origin and Future of
Life," Chemical and Engineering News, 20 December 1999, 25-28.

28. David Morrison to Astrobiology Workshop Participants, 2 June 1998.

29. Astrobiology Roadmap; David Morrison, "The NASA Astrobiology Program,"
Astrobiology 1 (2001): 3-13.

Notes to Pages 222-232 285

Epilogue

1 . Henry McDonald to Astrobiology Science Conference attendees, 29 March 2000,
in First Astrobiology Science Conference, abstract, 3-5 April 2000. Bruce Jakosky,
a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado, was the chair of the Scientific
Organizing Committee, and Lynn Rothschild of Ames served as the chair of the
Local Organizing Committee.

2. Baruch Blumberg and Keith Cowing, "Astrobiology at T + 5 Years," Ad Astra (Janu-
ary-February 2002): 10-11.

3. An excellent historical treatment of origin of life research is Iris Fry, The Emer-
gence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2000).

4. The abstracts for the topics discussed here are in the abstract book from the First
Astrobiology Science Conference, 3-5 April 2000. The abstracts for the second As-
trobiology Science Conference are published in International Journal of Astrobi-
ology 1 (April 2002): 87-176.

5. National Research Council, A Science Strategy for the Exploration ofEuropa (Wash-
ington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999); National Research Council, Prevent-
ing the Forward Contamination ofEuropa (Washington, D.C.: National Academy
Press, 2000); NASA, Publication AO 99-OSS-04, Deep Space Systems: Europa Or-
biter Mission (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1999).

6. The report of the Workshop on Societal Implications of Astrobiology, 16-19 No-
vember 1999 at NASA Ames, is available as a NASA Technical Memorandum at
<http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/workshops/societal/>, revised 20 January2001.

7. Steven J. Dick, "SETI and the Postbiological Universe," published as "Culttaral Evo-
lution, the Postbiological Universe, and SETI," InternationalJournal of Astrobiol-
ogy 2 (2003): 65-74; Dick, "Cultural Implications of Astrobiology: A Preliminary
Reconnaissance at the Turn of the Millennium," in Bioastronomy '99: A New Era
in Bioastronomy, ed. G. Lemarchand and K. Meech (San Francisco: Astronomical
Society of the Pacific, 2000), 649-659.

8. "Pioneering the Future," address by Sean O'Keefe, Syracuse University, 12 April
2002.

9. DeVincenzi OHI, 12 May 1997, 18.

10. Michael J. Drake and Bruce M. Jakosky, "Narrow Horizons in Astrobiology," Na-
ture 415 (2002): 733-734. In 2003 the National Research Council of the National
Academies issued a seminal report on astrobiology programs. Life in the Universe:
An Assessment of U.S. and International Programs in Astrobiology (Washington,
D.C., National Academies Press, 2003). The study was conducted by the Commit-
tee on the Origins and Evolution of Life (COEL) of the Space Studies Board/Board
of Life Sciences, and was co-chaired by Jonathan Lunine and John Baross.

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Index

Page references for figures are printed in italics.

Abelson, Philip, 24-25, 101,110, 245-

246n4,246nl3, 249n60
Ackerman, Thomas, 122-125, 249n63
Adams, James, 134
adenine, synthesis of, 72, 74
Akoyunoglou, George, 36
ALH84001. See Martian meteorite
Allamandola, Louis, 224, 225, 249n63
Allen, Paul, 153, 154
Altman, Sidney, 71, 129
Alvarez, Luis, 118-121
Alvarez, Walter, 118-121
American Institute for Biological

Sciences(AIBS), 48, 51,65
Ames Research Center (NASA), 18, 19,

35-39, 43, 50, 56, 66-67, 73-78, 82,

90,93, 114-115, 119-126, 182,

249nn61-62; and astrobiology, 202-

220; and life sciences, 133; and SETI,

132 ff.
amino acids, 2, 25-26, 39-40, 73; in lunar

samples, 42, 75-76; in meteorites,

75-79, 196-197
"analytikers," 71-72, 128
Angel, Roger, 1 74
Antarctic dry valleys, 86-87, 183,

262n34
anthropocentrism: banned, 12; demise of,

15
anti-chance conception of OOL chemistry,

40^1,52, 111-112
Apex chert microfossils, 113-114, 199-200
Apollo 11, A?,,!?,,!^, 95
Apollo 12, 43, 76

archaea, 49, 67, 102, 105-109, 111, 224,
226

Arrhenius, Gustaf, 74, 127, 200

Ashley, Bill, 81

Asimov, Isaac, 3 1

asteroids, 118-125

astrobiology: Academy, 219-220;
definition, 1,202,205-213;
disciplinary status, 23 1 ; and
exobiology, 4-5, 206, 212, 221;
journals, 20; and Origins program,
206, 214; roadmap, 217-220, 240-
241; and SETI, 222; and society, 218-
219, 222, 230-231; term used in
1950s, 17-18; workshops, 211-212

Astrobiology Institute, 1, 19-20, 202,
205, 207, 208, 211,213-217; budget,
223; directors, 214; journals, 223;
members, 214-215, 223; research,
224-229,231

Astrobiology Science Conference, 1 , 46,
222-223, 239

Astrometric Imaging Telescope, 169, 170

Astrometric Interferometry Mission, 1 72

astronaut medicine, 30, 50, 53, 132

Aumann, Hartmut, 1 64

"autotrophs first" approach to OOL, 63,
72, 254n28

Averner, Mel, 208

Bada, Jeffrey, 48, 126-128, 196-197,

251n87
Bahadur, Krishna, 12-74, 254n28,

257n77

295

296 Index

Bahcall, John, 169

Banin, Amos, 73-74, 249n63

Barghoorn, Elso, 48^9, 53, 65, 1 10-

111,113, 268-269nn24-25; NASA

funding, 110-111
Barnard's star, 156
Bar-nun, Akiva, 249n63
Baross, John, 109, 194-195
Bay of Pigs, 82
Beem, Don, 141

Berdahl, Bonnie, 81, 95, 265n94
Berger, J., 73
Bernal, John Desmond, 40, 71, 73, 128,

282n88
Berry, Bill, 81, 203, 204
Beta Pictoris, 164-765
Biemann, Klaus, 84, 91-92, 97-99
Billingham, John, 18, 114-115, 119-120,

132ff., ;i7, /5i, 156, 160; and

astrobiology, 203-204; Chief of SETI

Office at Ames, 147; and societal

impact of SETI, 219
bioastronomy, 14. See also astrobiology;

exobiology
biocosmology, 10
biofilms, 195
biofriendly universe, 10
Biological Evolution of Mars:

International Symposium (1990), 182
biological universe, 10
Biosphere 2, 254n28
Black, David, 136, 156-158, 159-161,

166, 167, 168; and Origins program,

176; and Orion project, 158-159
Blake, David, 249n63
Blanchard, Douglas, 189
Blois, M. Scott, 32
Blum, Harold, 32
Blumberg, Baruch, 208, 214-216, 219,

221,222,223
Bogard, Donald, 180-181
Bonner, William, 249n63
"bootlegging," 26, 246-247nl6
Borucki, Bill, 166, 177,229
Boss, Alan, 171
Bova, Ben, 219
Bowman, Gary, ^7
Bowyer, Stuart, 147

Boyce, Peter, 141

Bracewell, Ronald, 133, 137, 157, 158,

174
Bradbury, Ray, 2
Bradley, John, 193, 199
Brasier, Martin, 199-200, 225
Bremermann, Hans, 64
Briggs, Geoffrey, 1 67
Brin, David, 142
Brock, Thomas, 65-67, 87, 255n45, 267-

268nl5
Brocker, David, 151
Brockett, H. R., 137
Brown, Allan, 59
Brown, Fred, 99

Brown, Harrison, 31-32, 109, 137
Brown, Robert, 1 69
brown dwarf, 165, 176
Brunk, William E., 159
Bryan, Richard, 149-151, 160
Buescher, Vera, 136, 137, 138, 153
Buhl, David, 48-49
bureaucratic mindset, 37
Buseck, Peter, 195, 198
Burke, Bernard F., 141,167
Burrows, C. I, 169
Butler, Paul, 168, 169, 171-172, 175

CIA, 26-29

Cairns-Smith, A. Graham, 72-74, 128,

258n83
Calvin, Melvin, 3, 16, 18, 25, 32, 36, 61,

246nl3, 249n60, 258n83
Cameron, A.G.W., 132, 137, 156
Cameron, Roy, 86
Campbell, Bruce, 171
Campbell, W. W., 12
Caren, Linda, 249n63, 255n48, 257n77
Carle, Glenn, 81
CASETI (Cultural Aspects of SETI),

149-150
catastrophism, new, 1 06, 111, 118
Cech, Thomas, 71, 128-129
CETI (Communication with

Extraterrestrial Intelligence):

distinguished from SETI, 136
Chaisson, Eric, 17, 141
Chambers, Robert, 10

Index 297

Chandra telescope, 174

Chang, Sherwood, 12-74, 133, 182

Chargaff, Erwin, 26

chemiosmotic coupling, 63, 254n31

chicken and egg problem, 67-71, 73,
128-130

Chun, Bill, 81

Chyba, Chris, 126, 249n63, 271n83

Clark, Benton, 95, 109, 114, 181-182

Clarke, Arthur C, 227

clays, role in OOL, 72-73, 128, 272n88

Clayton, Robert, 182

Clemett, Simon, 185

Clinton, Bill, 179, 190

Cloud, Preston, 65-66, 74, 84, 1 10-1 13,
251n96, 268-269n24

Cocconi, Giuseppe, 16, 132

Cody, George, 200-201

Cold War, 23-30, 57-59, 82, 245n2

Committee on Planetary and Lunar
Exploration (COMPLEX). See
National Academy of Sciences

Compton, Dale, 152

Condon, Estelle, 205

Congress, U. S. See SETI

Connell, Kathleen, 205, 212-213, 219

Connors, Mary, 138

contamination problem, 2, 24-25, 29,
58-61, 73-76, 78-79, 85-86; in
rhetorical Cold War sense, 248n42;
Columbus and syphilis analogy, 59-
61; "quarantine" of lunar samples, 76.
See also Planetary Protection

Conte, Silvio, 148-149

Cordova, France, 204, 205

Corliss, John, 106, 109

cosmic evolution. See evolution, cosmic.

cosmic haystack, 140

COSPAR, 44-45, 59, 82, 247n22

Coyne, Lelia, 249n63

Creationist OOL literature, 105, 266nl

Cronin, John, 77, 109, 129, 198

Crowe, Michael, 10

Crutzen Paul, 122

Cullers, Kent, 146

Cyclops project, 134-136

Dalton, Bonnie, 81

Danielli, James, 254n36

Darwin, Charles, 11, 13, 106, 118

Davies, Richard, 82, 86

Davis, Mike, 141

Dawkins, Richard, 116-117

Day, William, 42, 251 n85

Deamer, David, 63, 182, 225

Deep Space Network (DSN), 150, 153

Delbriick, Max, 69

Demarais, David, 67, 225, 282n88

Despain, Alvin, 145

Deverall, Genelle, 81

DeVincenzi, Donald, 38, 43, 48-52, 61,

114, 123-124, 197-198; and

astrobiology, 206, 208, 209, 212, 231,

249n63
Dicke, Robert, 158
Dose, Klaus, 1 82, 249n63
Drake, Frank, 4, 16, 17, 132, 133, 137,

141, 143; 153, 157; President of SETI

Institute, 148
Drake, Michael, 181,253n2
Drake Equation, 16, 144, 156
Dressier, Alan, 173
Dryden, Hugh, 24
dual origins hypothesis, 67-71,

256nn56-57
Dune, 87

Dworkin, Jason, 225
Dyson, Freeman, 67-7 1

EETA79001, 180-181

Earth System Science, 105, 117-118

EASTEX, 25, 30

ecosphere, 135

Edelson, Robert, 137, 138, 139

Edsall, John, 54

Ehrlich, Richard, 32

Eigen, Manfred, 31, 128, 252nl04

Eisenhower, Dwight, 24

Elachi, Charles, 166, 174

Elsasser, Walter, 65

endosymbiosis, 3

Engelberg, Joseph, 64

eobiology (coined by N.W Pirie), 29

Epstein, Eugene, 137

Europa, 4, 179, 227-228, 229

European Space Agency, 20

298 Index

evolution, cosmic: 9-20, 11,19; birth of
idea, 10-14; and Chaisson, 17;
Chambers, 10; 9-22; definition of, 9-
10, 243n2; Drake Equation, 16; Fiske,
1 1 ; Flammarion, 1 1 ; Hale, 244n7;
Henderson, 13; images of, 11, 19;
Laplace, 10; NASA as chief
patron, 18; and Origins program,
173-174, 177; Proctor, 1 1; Reeves,
17; as research program, 14-20;
Sagan, 17; SETl, 10, 18-19; Shapley,
17; Shklovskii, 16; and space age, 17-
18; Spencer, 1 1; Wallace, 12-13

evolution, cultural, 10, 16, 136

evolution. Darwinian, 9, 10

Evolution of Complex and Higher
Organisms (ECHO) Report, 1 15,
119-121, 124, 126,204

evolution of life. See life, evolution of

exobiology: and American space

program, 3, 5; and astrobiology, 4-5,
204, 206, 212, 221; and biology, 3;
birth of, 1, 18; as discipline, 4-5, 17-
18, 43-55, 231; and Mars rock, 4; and
public relations, 3; scope of, 4. See
also astrobiology

Exploration of Neighboring Planetary
Systems (ExNPS), 174, 175

extinctions. See mass extinctions

faint young sun paradox, 85

Fantasia, 2

Farmer, Jack, 227, 249n63

Fedo, Chris, 200

Fermi paradox, 142

Fesenkov, V, 16

Ferris, James, 249n63

Field, George, 1 60

Field Museum, 76

"fishbowl": working in, 97, 99

Fiske, John, 11-12

Fiske, Lennard, 168, 170

Flammarion, Camille, 11-12

Fletcher, James, 136

Floras, Jose, 75

Florkin, Marcel, 54

Folk, Robert, 184, 194

Folsome, Clair, 62, 249n63, 257n77; as

consultant to Biosphere 2, 254n28
Fort Detrich germ warfare labs, 32,

248n42
Fox, George E., 125
Fox, Ronald, 69
Fox, Sidney, 3, 18, 26, 31-35, 39-44, 50-

52, 54, 59, 67-69, 71-72, 246nl3;

Exobiology Program Directors and,

43,71, 124, 25 In87,257n74.5ee a/50

S. Miller, dispute with
Fraknoi, Andrew, 148
Fremont-Smith, Frank, 261n27
Friedmann, E. Imre, 93-94, 182, 198,

264n64
Frosch, Robert, 143, 161, 162
Fry, Iris, 51-52, 105, 199

GCMS (Viking), 80, 84, 91-93, 95-101,

182, 186, 265n86
Gabel, Norm, 249n63
Gagarin, Yuri, 82
Gaia hypothesis, 3, 48^9, 81-86, 102,

105, 114-118, 125, 130
Galileo, 179, 227, 262n31
Gam, Jake, 149

Gatewood, George, 157, 158, 159, 168
"gemischers," 71-72. See also "synthetic

approach" to OOL
"gene-first" approach to OOL, 41—42,

63, 67-71. See also "information-
first" approach
geophysiology, 84—85, 117; as "closet

Gaia," 117
Gerathewol, Siegfried, 249n60
Gibson, Everett, 180, 183-201
Gilbert, Walter, 208, 272n92
Gilbreath, Bin, 757
Gillett, Fred, 164
Glennan, Keith, 30-31
Goddard Space Institute, 2 1 3
Goddard Spaceflight Center (GSFC),

203,211
Gold, Thomas, 30
Goldin, Daniel, 1 , 94; and Mars rock,

189-192; and astrobiology, 202-203,

204, 205, 207, 214-215, 276-218;

and Origins program, 174, 175-176
Golub, Ellis, 92

Index 299

Goodwin, Brian, 65
Gore,Al, 179, 190
Gould, Stephen J., 106, 111
gradualism, 106, 111, 118
Grady, Monica, 1 83
Graham, Loren, 1 5, 26
Great Observatories, 177
Greenberg, J. Mayo, 1 82
Greenstein, Jesse, 7^7, 156-158, 159,

160
Gregg, John, 64
Griffin, Roger, 158
Gulkis, Sam, 137, 141
Gulliver experiment, 31-35, 57, 83-88;

Horowitz as advisor on, 32, 52, 86, 88
Guastaferro, Angelo "Gus," 160
Guerrero, Ricardo, 115
Gunflint formation, 48, 66, 1 10
Gupta, Radhey, 267n9

Haddock, Fred, 137

Haldane, J.B.S., 15, 23, 40^1, 109. See
also Oparin-Haldane theory

Hale, George EUery, 12

Hamilton, Paul, 76

Hamilton, William, 116-117

Harada, Kaoru, 40

Harper, Lynn, 203-204, 205-21 1, 213

Hart, Michael, 142

Hartline, M. Keffer, 30

Hartman, Hyman, 73-74, 125, 266n2

Harvey, Ralph, 183, 193, 199

Harvey, R. B., 255n45

Hayes, John, 66, 112-113

Haymaker, Webb, 37

Healy, Mylan, 171

Heisenberg, Werner, 99

Henderson, Lawrence J., 13

Herrera, Alfonso, 71-72, 257n75

"heterotrophs first" approach to OOL,
63, 72, 256-257n70. See also Oparin-
Haldane hypothesis

Hewlett, William, 153

Heyns, Roger, 148

High Resolution Microwave Survey
(HRMS), 144, 147, 150, 152

Hill, Henry, 158

Hines, John, 212

Hipparcos satellite, 159, 161

Hitchcock, Dian, 83

Hobby, George, 86

Hofmann, Hans, 112-113

Holland, Heinrich ("Dick"), 48^9, 109-

110
Holloway, Harry, 204
Holton, Emily, 208
Horowitz, Norman, 3, 25, 30-31, 41-42,

57-61, 71, 83-97, 192; and scientific

skepticism, 58-59, 80, 85-88;

develops pyrolytic release experiment,

88ff
Howard, Rick, 208
Hoyle, Fred, 156
Huang, Su-Shu, 16,132
Hubbard, Jerry, 86, 95
Hubbard, Scott: and astrobiology, 205,

208,210-211,213,214,218
Hubble Space Telescope (HST), 166,

169, 172,174, 176
Huntoon, Carol, 1 89
Huntress, Wesley, 152, 176, 189, 204,

205, 208, 209
hydrothermal vents, undersea, 67, 102,

105-109, 112, 126-127, 199-200,

255n45

Icarus (journal), 83

Iceland, 66

"information first" approach to OOL,

67-71
Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS),

160-161,164, 172
intelligence, evolution of, 16. See also

SETI
interdisciplinarity of exobiology, 47, 49-

50, 52-53
interferometry, optical, 158, 169-178
information theory, computer metaphors,

69-70
International Astronomical Union, 20
International Society for the Study of

the Origin of Life (ISSOL), 20, 43,

54
International Space Station, 210, 212,

217
Ivanov, Mikhail, 1 82

300 Index

Jacobs, George, 63-65, 249n60

Jakosky, Bruce, 218, 222, 230, 253n2

Jannasch, Holger, 106

Jeans, James, 13, 134

"Jeewanu," 72-73,

Jehle, Herbert, 64-65

Jenniskens, Peter, 21 1

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), 36, 49,
82-86, 88-93, 97-100, 203; and
astrobiology, 211, 213, 214; and
exobiology, 132; and planetary
systems search, 169, 171, 173;
and SETI, 138, 141, 142, 144, 146-
147, 150, 153

Johnson, Lyndon, 86

Johnson, Pratt, 180-181

Johnson, Richard, 81

Johnson Space Center, 132, 203, 211,
213,214,230

Journal of Molecular Evolution, 54

Joyce, Gerald, 127, 129

Jungck, John, 251n85

K-T asteroid theory, 118-121, 124
Kajander, Olavi, 194
Kamminga, Harmke, 74, 256n56
Kaplan, Isaac ("Ian"), 1 12, 259nl04,

282n88
Kapor, Mitch, 153
Kasting, James, 110, 124-125,225,

249n63
Katchalsky, Aharon Katzir, 73
Kauffman, Stuart, 52, 63
Keck Observatory, 168-170
Kennedy, John R, 57, 64
Kenyon, Dean, 258n78, 262n40, 266nl
Kepler mission, 177
Kerr, Richard, 181, 194, 196, 199-200
Kerridge, John, 197
Kirschvink, Joseph, 193, 198-199
Klein, Harold R, 37-39, 50, 53, 78, 81,

90-91, 93, 95, 98-102, 125, 132, 138,

182,231
Klein, Michael, 146
Knoll, Andrew, 111, 124-125, 182,214
Kondo, Joji, 137

Kramer, Sol, 48, 258n78, 261n27
Kuhn, Thomas, 42, 108, 118, 267n9

Kuiper, Gerard, 1 7

Kvenvolden, Keith, 37-39, 66, 75-78,
1 10; dispute with Ponnamperuma,
77-78, 250n67, 259-260nnI04-
105

Lacey, James, 40

Lahav, Noam, 73-74, 249n63

Lanyi, Janos, 249n63

Laplace, Pierre Simon, 10

Laser-Raman spectroscopy, 1 99

Lawless, James, 13-74, 75

Lawrence, JefTrey, 195

Lawton, John, 1 1 8

Lazcano, Antonio, 111, 182

Lederberg, Joshua, and exobiology, 3, 18,

23-35, 53, 57-62, 81, 90, 93, 101-

102, 263-264n60
Lehninger, Albert, 42^3
Lehwalt, Marjorie, 81, 265n94
Lenton, Tim, 1 1 7
Lepeschinskaya, Olga, 247nl7
Levin, Gilbert, 31-35, 57, 81, 83, S6~89,

90,95-102, 182
Levinthal, Elliott, 32-35, 262n28
Levy, Gerald, 137
Lewis Research Center, 213
LF. See Life Finder
life, classification of, 3; definition of, 4,

62, 67-71,81,83, 87, 262n40;

evolution of, 224; future of, 230;

origin (OOL) of, 2, 43-47, 53-54,

61-79, 105-130, 195,224-227
Life Finder, 177
Lightman, Bernar4 12
Lilly, John C, 16, 35, 246nl3
Linscott, Ivan, 145
Lipman, Charles B., 256-257n70
Lipmann, Fritz, 30
Lockyer, Norman, 12
Lovelace, W. Randolph, 53
Lovelock, James, 3, 32, 48^9, 57, 81-

85, 114-118, y;5,271n70; and CFCs,

260n8
Lowell, Percival, 2, 12, 90, 131
Luria, Salvador, 69
Lyell, Charles, 106, 118
Lysenko, Trofim D., 26, 247nl7

Index 301

MacDonald, Henry, 208, 214, 2M, 218,

222
MacNab, Robert, 108
McKay, Chris, 94, 182, 249n63
McKay, David, 180, 182-201
McLuhan, Marshall, 261n27
McSween, Harry, 182-183, 193
Machol, Robert, 137
"macrobes," 87
Machtley, Ronald, 148-149
Mamikunian, Gregg, 53
Man in Space program, NASA, 30. See

also Project Mercury
Marcy, Geoffrey, 168, 169, 171-172, 175
Margulis, Lynn, 3, 44, 47^9, 68, 72-73,

80,84, 108, 114-;;5, 128, 195,

251n84; funding, 25 ln94
Mariner 2, 56

Mariner 4, 58, 86-88, 102, 252nl 15
Mariner 6 and 7, 90
Mariner 9,90, 122
Mariner B, 32, 58, 82-84, 89. See also

Voyager
Mariner Mack, Ruth, 37, 39
Mark, Hans, 78, 133, 138, 144
Mars: in American popular culture, 2;

and astrobiology, 22, 177; gullies,

228. See also Martian meteorite;

Viking
Mars Global Surveyor, 179, 227
Mars Odyssey, 102, 227
Mars Pathfinder, 100, 179, 227, 264n60
Marshall Spaceflight Center, 213
mass extinctions, 118-125
Martian Chronicles, The, 2
Martian meteorite, 4, 179-201, 262n34;

first collected, 183; main lines of

evidence for biomarkers, 187
Martin, James, 93

Maynard Smith, John, 69-71, 116-117
Mayor, Michel, 171, 172
Mayr, Ernst, 108
MCSA (Multi-Channel Spectrum

Analyzer), 140-141, 145-146
Meinschein, Warren, 74-75
Meselson, Matthew, 25
"metabolism first" approach to OOL,

63-64,67-71

meteorite. See Martian meteorite;

Murchison meteorite
Meteoritics and Planetary Science

(journal), 195
Meyer, Michael, 38, 48, 61, 94, 127,

190-191, 206-207, 208, 212, 213,

217-218,222,223
Microwave Observing Project (MOP),

144
Mikulski, Barbara, 149
Miller, Stanley, 2, 3, 15, 25-28, 27, 48,

73, 1 10, 126-130, 246nl3, 246-

247nl6; NAS nomination, 54-55;

opposition to S. Fox, 41^3, 67, 71-

72
Miller-Urey experiment, 2, 15-16, 25-

27, 40, 56, 78, 88, 92, 109-1 10, 126-

128, 199,246nl2, 282n87
Mitchell, Peter, 63, 254nn31, 36
Mittlefehldt, David, 183-184
Mojzsis, Steve, 200

molecular clouds, interstellar, 43, 49, 78
moon: analysis of rocks, 40, 73-76, 181-

182, 184; formation of, 106
Moore, Carleton, 35, 51, 76-78, 249n63
Moore, Gordon, 1 53
Morgan, Thomas Hunt, 40
Morris, Dick, 190-191; and prostitute

girlfriend, 190
Morrison, David, 164, 167, and

astrobiology, 205, 207, 208, 209, 217,

218,222,323
Morrison, Philip, 16, 132, 144; SETI

workshops, 136, 137, 138, 156-159,

160,219
Morowitz, Harold, 32, 61-65, 76, 117,

194; Onsager-Morowitz definition

of life, 62
Mount St. Helens, 106
Muller, H. J.,30, 71
Muller, Richard, 121
Multivator, 32-35, 57-58
Munechika, Ken, 203
Murchison meteorite, 37-38, 66, 75-79
Murray, Bruce, 137, 138
Mutch, Thomas A., 1 62
Mutch, Tim, 262n39
Myhrvold, Nathan, 154

302 Index

Nanobacteria, 184, 186-188, 194-195,
199, 279n38

"NASA envy," 52, 54, 93

NSCORT, 126-128

National Academy of Sciences:

COMPLEX, 160, 162-164; Space
Science Board (SSB), 24-25, 30, 58-
61, 162. See also EASTEX, WESTEX

National Aeronautics and Space

Administration (NASA): astrobiology
patron, 1 ; Solar System Exploration
Committee (SSEC), 162, 165-166;
Solar System Exploration Division
(SSED), 167; and Space Science
Board of National Academy of
Sciences, 162. See also Ames
Research Center; Goddard
Spaceflight Cel er; Jet Propulsion
Laboratory; Johnson Space Center

National Institutes of Health, 4, 30, 35,
48

National Research Council (NRC)/NASA
Ames post-docs, 36-38, 73, 183,
249n63

National Science Foundation, 4, 30, 35,
47-48, 155, 172; "NSF culture" vs.
that of NASA, 47-48, 94, 120,
264n68

Naugle, John, 93, 263n60

Naval Observatory, 157

Nealson, Kenneth, 270n47

nebular hypothesis, 10, 13, 14-15, 156

Newell, Homer, 136

NGST (New Generation Space Telescope),
174, 176, 177

Nicogossian, Arnauld, 208

Nixon, Richard, 76

Novick, Aaron, 60-6 1

Nuclear winter, 122-125, 260n4

"nucleic acid monopoly," 41^3, 69. See
also "gene-first" approach,
information first" approach

O'Keefe, Sean, 231

Oliver, Bernard, 16, 134-136, 137, 143,
153, 156, 157; and Cyclops project,
134-136; Deputy Chief of SETI
Office at Ames, 147

one gene, one enzyme hypothesis, 58,

253n8
Oparin, Alexandr Ivanovich, 2, 15, 26-

29,25,40-41,71-72
Oparin-Haldane theory, 15-16, 63, 72
Orbiting Stellar Interferometer (OSI),

169,170, 173. See also Space

Interferometry Mission (SIM)
organics, exogenous delivery, 125-128
Orgel, Leslie, 42, 48, 72-73, 84, 91, 99,

127-129; NASA funding, 124
origins of life, 15-16, 43^7, 53-54, 61-

79, 105-114, 124-130, 195,224-227.

See also Oparin-Haldane theory
Origin of Life, The (Oparin), 2, 15,

246nnl4-15, 257n75
Origins of Life (journal), 20, 53-54, 95
Origins of Life and Evolution of the

Biosphere (journal), 20, 54
Origins program, 19, 172-178; and

astrobiology, 206, 207, 214
Orion nebula, 1 72
Orion project, 158-159
Oro, Juan (John, Joan), 32, 71-72, 74,

84, 91, 98, 192; Martian peroxide

theory, 88-89
Owen, Tobias, 125
Oyama, Vance, 36, 39, 81, 83-84, 90, 95,

265n94
Ozma, Project, 31

Pace, Norman, 125, 194

Packard, David, 153

Paecht-Horowitz, Mella, 73

Paine, Thomas, 76

Papagiannis, Michael, 143

Pasteris, Jill, 199

Pattee, Howard, 64

Pearman, J.P.T., 58

Pepin, Robert, 1 56

Pering, Katherine, 37, 39, 75, 259-

260nl05
Peterson, Allen, 145
Peterson, Etta, 39, 75
Phillips, Charles R., 32, 253nl 1
Pierson, Thomas, 148
Pike, John, 152
Pillinger, Colin, 183

Index 303

Pirie, Norman W., 40, 71, 74, 256n57,

262n40
Pittendrigh, Colin, 35, 58-59, 249nn53,

60
Pizzarello, Sandra, 78-79
Planetary Biology Subcommittee, NASA,

64,76
planetary protection, 2, 59-61
planetary science, 161-171
planetary systems, 4, 136; 155-178, 229-

230; and cosmic evolution, 14-15; in

Cyclops report, 135; detection

techniques, 157-158, 229-230; and

Hubble Space Telescope, 166, 169,

172, 174; and Origins program, 172-

178; and planetary science, 161-171;

and PSSWG, 167-168, 170; and

SETI, 155-161; and SIRTF,

166;andTOPSSWG, 167-168, 170;

turning point in acceptance of, 15;

workshops, 156-161
plasmogeny, 7 1
Pollack, James, 122-126
Pollard, Ernest, 61-65, 108, 249n60
PAHs (polycyclic aromatic

hydrocarbons), 185-188, 192-196;

abiotic sources of, 1 85
Ponnamperuma, Cyril, 28, 36-39, 43^8,

53-54, 56, 66, 74-75, 77-78, 98, 133,

257n77; leg injury, 66, 77. See also

Kvenvolden, Keith, conflict with

Ponnamperuma
porphyrins, 75
Precision Optical Interferometer in Space

(POINTS), 169,170, 172
Proctor, Richard, 11-12
prokaryote-eukaryote distinction, 108.

See also Van Niel, C.B.
"protein-first" approach (to OOL), 41-43

69
proteinoid microspheres, 40^3, 72, 124
proteinoids, 39-43, 50-52, 72. See also

"thermal peptides"
protoplanetary disks, 172, 175
Proxmire, William, 142-144, 159
punctuated equilibrium, 106
pyrolytic release (PR) experiment.

Viking, 88fF

Quastler, Henry, 64
Queloz, Didier, 171, 172
Quimby, Freeman, 37, 40, 43, 50-51, 61,
249n60

RNA World, 71, 128-130

Raup, David, 112, 115, 119-121

Reagan Administration, 122, 125

Reasenberg, Robert, 169, 173

Ranger 1, 3 1

Reeves, Hubert, 1 7

Reich, Wilhelm, 258n78, 261n27

Reynolds, Orr, 50, 64, 246nl3, 249n60

Rich, Alex, 90, 93

Roberts, Richard, 208

Rohlfing, Duane, 249n63

Romanek, Chris, 183-201

Rosen, Robert, 65

Ross, Muriel, 204

Rothschild, Lynn, 222, 249n63

Roughgarten, Jonathan (now Joan), 65

Roussel UCLAF conference, 1973, Paris,

47,73
Rubey, William, 109-110
Rummel, John, 38, 48-49, 52, 94, 126-

127, 182, 249n63; as Planetary
Protection Officer, 61

Russell, Henry Norris, 1 5

Sagan, Carl, 3, 16, 17, 24-25, 31, 48, 53,
56-59, 71, 80-81, 83, 86-87, 100-
102, 122-126, 133, 143, 144, 192,
21 1, 245n2, 246nl3, 249n60, 252nl,
262n40, 265n86, 279n32

"Sagan standard of proof," 192, 198, 200

Sanchez, Robert, 71

Sapp,Jan, 47, 251n91

Scargle, Jeff, 166

Schmidt, Greg, 208,211

Schneider, Stephen, 1 14, 261nl6,
271n70

Schopf, J. William, 48, 1 10-1 14, 127-

128, 185, 190-192, 199-200, 225
Schrodinger, Erwin, 69-70, 99
Schwartz, Alan, 40, 48, 54, 1 1 \-112,

249n63, 251n83
"science without a subject," 29-31, 55
Seeger, Charles, 136, 137, 138, 153

304 Index

Sepkoski, Joseph Jr., 119-121, 124,
271n68

SERENDIP, 147, 154

serial endosymbiosis theory (SET), 3,
47^8, 68, 256n57

Serkowski, Krzysztof, 158, 159

SETl (Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence), 10, 18-19, 131-154;
Allen Array, 154; and astrobiology,
222; cancellation of, 4; Congressional
action on, 18, 141-142, 148-151;
distinguished from CETI, 1 36;
moved from Life Sciences to Space
Science and NASA HQ, 147;
Phoenix project, 153-154; and
planetary systems, 155-161; sky
survey, 144-145, 150, 153; societal
implications, 149-150; "Square
Kilometer Array," 1 54; targeted
search, 144-145, 150, 153; and TOPS,
147; and Viking, 139. See also
SERENDIP

SETI Institute, 20; origin of, 148; and
project Phoenix, 153-154

Shao, Michael, 159, 169, 170-171, 173,
174

Shapley, Harlow, 1 7

Shergottite-Nakhlite-Chassignite(SNC)
meteorites, 181-201, 278nn9, 16

Shklovskii, Joseph, 16-17, 133

Shock, Everett, 74, 126

Sillen, Lars Gunnar, 49, 84

SIM. See Space Interferometry Mission

Simpson, George Gaylor4 18, 29-31, 55,
57,231

simulacra ("cell model experiments"),
71-72

Singleton, Rivers, 249n63

Sinton, William, 17

SIRTF, 173, 174

Slepecky, Ralph, 35

Smith, Adolph, 72, 249n63, 257-
258nn77-78

Soffen, Gerald, 32, 52, 90—9/, 93, 95,
97, 102; and astrobiology, 209-210,
213,214,219, 221

SOFIA, 173

Sogin, Mitchell, 125

Solar System Exploration Committee

(SSEC), NASA, 162, 164, 165-166
Solar System Exploration Division

(SSED),NASA, 167, 169
Space Infrared Telescope (SIRTF), 166,

167, 173
Space Interferometry Mission (SIM),

173, 174, 176, 177. See also Orbiting

Stellar Interferometer (OSI)
Space Interferometry Science Working

Group (SISWG), 173-175
space medicine, 132
Space Science Board (SSB). See

National Academy of Sciences
Space Sciences, NASA Office of.

Exobiology housed within, 36,

50-53
space station, 152, 166
space telescope, 159, 161. See also

Hubble Space Telescope
spectroscopy, 12
Spencer, Herbert, 1 1
Spencer Jones, Sir Harold, 15
spontaneous generation, 1 1
Sputnik 1, 16,23-24,26
Sputnik 2, 23-24
Sridhar, K. R., 212
Stanier, Roger, 108
Stapledon, Olaf, 14, 83, 261nl4
Steinman, Gary, 72, 258n78
Stent, Gunther, 25
Stillwell, William, 251 n85
Stolper, Edward, 196
Stone, Ed, 152
Straat, Patricia, 95, 99-100
Strand, Kaj, 15, 157
stromatolites, 66-67, 1 10
Stull,Mark, 136,757, 138
Struve, Otto, 16, 17-18
Suess, Hans, 109
Surtsey, 66
Surveyor, 82
Swensen, George, 14 J
synthetic ("constructionist") approach to

OOL, 71-72, 257n74. See also

"gemischers"
Szathmary, Eors, 69-7 1
Szent-Gyorgy, Albert, 64

Index 305

Tarter, Jill, 138, 141, 151, 153, 249n63;

NASA SETI Project scientist, 147-148
Tayor, Edwin, 65
Taylor, William, 64
Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), 175, 176,

177
theoretical biology, 63-65
"thermal peptides," 42
Thomas-Keprta, Kathy, 180, 184-201
Tipler, Frank, 142, 143
Tofner,Alvin, 219
Toon, Owen, 122-125, 249n63
TOPS (Toward other Planetary Systems),

and SETI, 147
Townes, Charles, 174
Townsend, Bill, 204
TOPS (Toward Other Planetary Systems),

147, 167-171
TPF. See Terrestrial Planet Finder
Troland, Leonard, 71
Turco, Richard, 122-125
Tyler, Stanley, 1 10

UFOs, 4, 131

Ulrich, Peter, 208

Urey, Harold, 2, 15, 25-27, 30-31, 33-

35,41, 109-1 10, 246nl3
Uwins, Philippa, 194

Vali, Hojatollah, 186

van de Kamp, Peter, 15, 17, 156, 227

van Niel, C. B., 25, 63, 108

vents. See hydrothermal vents, undersea

Vernikos, Joan, 205

Viewing, David, 142

Viking spacecraft, 18, 73, 80-102, 179-

180, 227; biology instrument, 80-57,

90-102
Vishniac, Wolf, 18, 30-35, 52, 57-59,

86-87, 93-94, 246n 13
Vogt, Steve, 172
Von Neumann, John, 68-69
Voyager, 82-84, 89. See also Mariner B
Voyager 2, 227

Waddington, C. H., 258n83

Wald, George, 16, 30, HI

Walker, Gordon, 171

Walker, James C. G., 110

Wallace, Alfred Russel, 12-13

Walter, Malcolm, 66-67, 1 12-1 13

War of the Worlds, 2

Waterman, Alan T, 113, 254nl6

Webb, James, 36, 52

Weber, Bruce, 254n29

Weiler, Edward, 160

Weiss, Armin, 74

Welch, Jack, 7^7,148

Welles, Orson, 2

Westall, Frances, 195

WESTEX, 25, 59-61

White, David, 73

Whitehouse, Martin, 200

Williams, Frederick, 64

Wilson, Edward O., 30

Wisniesk, Richard, 203

Woeller, Fritz, 37, 39, 57, 265n94

Woese, Carl, 3, 47^9, 61-62, 67, 72,

106-109, 707, 130, 224, 226; NASA

fiinding amounts, 251n94
Wolf Trap, 30-35, 57, 93-94
Wolfe, Audra, 30, 245nl, 248n42
Wolfe, John, 136, 137, 138, 141
"Worm," The, 750, 192-194
Wright, Ian, 183

Yeas, Martynas, 64, 254-255n40

Yale University Biophysics Department,

61-62, 108
Yellowstone hot springs, 65-67
Young, Richard S., 35-i5, 40, 43-51,

53-54, 61-62, 66, 71, 93-94, 112-

114, 133, 182,249n60
Yuen, George, 77, 249n63

Zahnle, Kevin, 249n63, 270n55
Zare, Richar4 1 85
Zill, L. R, 37-39
Zuckerman, Ben, 141

About the Authors

Steven J. Dick is the Chief Historian at NASA. Prior to that, he worked as an
astronomer and historian of science at the U.S. Naval Observatory, ending as
Chief of its Nautical Almanac Office. He obtained his B.S. degree in astrophysics
(1971) and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history and philosophy of science (1977)
from Indiana University and is well known as an expert in the field of astrobi-
ology and its cultural implications. He is author of Plurality of Worlds: The Ori-
gins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (1982), The
Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the
Limits of Science (1996), and Life on Other Worlds (1998), the latter translated
into four languages. He was also editor of Many Worlds: The New Universe, Ex-
traterrestrial Life, and the Theological Implications (2000/ His most recent book
is a history of the Naval Observatory, Sky and Ocean Joined: The U.S. Naval
Observatory, 1830-2000 (2003).

Dr Dick served on Vice President Al Gore's panel to examine the soci-
etal implications of possible life in the Mars rock and is the recipient of the
NASA Group Achievement Award "for initiating the new NASA multidisci-
plinary program in astrobiology, including the definition of the field of astrobi-
ology, the formulation and initial establishment of the NASA Astrobiology
Institute, and the development of a Roadmap to guide future NASA investments
in astrobiology." He is on the editorial board of several journals, including the
Journal for the History of Astronomy and the International Journal of Astrobi-
ology. He has served as Chairman of the Historical Astronomy Division of the
American Astronomical Society and as President of the History of Astronomy
Commission of the International Astronomical Union. He is currently President
of the Philosophical Society of Washington and a recent recipient of the Navy
Meritorious Civilian Service Award.

James E. Strick is trained as a microbiologist and a historian of science. After
completing his B.S. degree in biology (1981) then an M.S. degree (1983) at
SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, he taught high school
and middle school biology and chemistry for ten years then returned to graduate

About the Authors 308

Study in the history of science at Princeton, completing an M.A. and Ph.D. de-
gree (1997). His research interests include Darwin studies and the history of
microbiology, especially ideas about the origin and nature of life. His first book,
Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Gen-
eration (2000), is a close-up look at heated debates about the origin of life among
Darwin and his followers in the first twenty years after publication of On the
Origin of Species.

Dr. Strick won the History of Science Society's 1994 Henry and Ida
Schuman Prize. He has taught at Arizona State University, Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity, and Princeton and was a visiting senior fellow at the Center for History
of Recent Science, George Washington University. He is currently Assistant Pro-
fessor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Franklin and
Marshall College.

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